


to cancel half a Line

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [98]
Category: Crimson Peak (2015), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Attempted Murder, Codependency, Crimson Peak Inspired, Death, F/M, Ghosts, Gothic, Gothic Romance, Incest, Magic, Twincest, gothic horror, maxicest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-22 06:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8276480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: It is an odd feeling, to resent belonging to her twin in the way they always have. Is this what Pietro felt when she had reminded him that they had to kill Crystal and Luna? This absolute denial and refusal, strong as the frozen clay, that had started from so simple a thing as a creeping reluctance, worrying her stomach like fluttering moths? How could something so soft and simple turn so absolute, iron-hard like iced clay? Wanda thinks she might now understand why Pietro did not tell her so swiftly when Crystal happened.“Don’t,” she whispers. Her fingertips tap over the skin of her brother’s collarbones, she can feel the bones themselves - so delicately strong, like so many things about them both - just beneath. “Please do not kill him.” She tilts her head, lets out an uneasy breath. “Not yet.”(AKA the Maximoff Twins Crimson Peak AU that no one asked for)





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is the Crimson Peak AU that no one wanted and that I wrote anyway because I love the Maximoff twins and I love Crimson Peak and _look this story was waiting to be written gothic horror elements and all don't judge me_.
> 
> Thanks goes to [SecondStarOnTheLeft](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft)/[cosmonauthill](http://cosmonauthill.tumblr.com/)/Niamh, [TobermorianSass](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass)/[Jojo](http://tobermoriansass.tumblr.com/), [stormingtheivory/Sam](http://stormingtheivory.tumblr.com/) and to [wandasmaximoffs](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wandasmaximoffs)/[Rintaire](http://rintaire.tumblr.com/) for all of their encouragment. Special, _special_ thanks go to [malapropism](http://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism/pseuds/malapropism)/[ababelofprose](http://ababelofprose%20.tumblr.com/) for their wonderful, brilliant Beta-ing of this monster of a fic.
> 
> Especially the italics culling.
> 
> The title comes from verse LXXI of [The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám](http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html), in full:
> 
> **LXXI**  
>  _The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,_  
>  _Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit_  
>  _Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,_  
>  _Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it._

**i.  
** They meet young Vision Stark in America, and he may not be exactly their usual target but: “He is enough,” Wanda says. “And it is my choice besides.”

(They do not speak of why it is not Pietro’s choice this time.)

“It is my choice,” she says again, her hand resting on her brother’s arm. “And it is time.”

Vision is the second, and - after the dramatic public fall of Ultron - only living son of inventor Tony Stark, and has a certain amount of wealth of his own.

(“I could kill Stark,” Pietro offers. “More for our vengeance, and to give your Vision more money.”)

(“No,” Wanda says. “We will take Stark’s last son from him. He took our parents’ business from them. That is even enough.”)

(Something dark and vicious glitters bright in Pietro’s blue eyes at that, at the idea of taking from the man who took from them.)

 

* * *

 

 **ii.  
** They watch for a long time. Even when they have met Vision, they watch. Pietro does not care to, but then, Wanda knows, Pietro is loath to see her on anyone’s arm but his. Wanda knows _why_ too, of course - she is just as loath to see Pietro on another’s arm, but she has learned to quash this loathing so they may meet their goals, has learned to paint a smile on her face and greet her brother’s companions with geniality. It is simple balance that means Pietro must at least _try_ to do the same.

“Don’t frown so, brother,” she whispers to him during a dinner. “Everyone will think you hate him.”

“I do hate him,” Pietro whispers as they ride in a carriage back to their hotel. “I hate anyone who might have you.”

Wanda’s head tilts, her lace-gloved hand gently cups her brother’s cheek. “I know, my love,” she says softly. “But this is necessary.”

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
Vision is, they learn, terribly naïve in a great many ways. Despite the spectacular fall and subsequent death of his brother he remains, somehow, almost innocent. Wanda finds it almost endearing - or would, if she could afford to - and it makes him terribly easy to talk to.

“It will hurt you though,” Pietro points out one evening when he’s brushing out her hair. “To have the trust of one so trusting only to break it.” He bends, presses a kiss to Wanda’s bare shoulder. “You are too soft-hearted, beloved.”

Wanda closes her eyes, lets herself simply feel her brother’s lips on her shoulder, his hands in her hair. He’s right, in some ways. She is compassionate, she does care. She, more than he, is capable of caring for those outside of just they two, she, more than he, must take care with what she feels as they play this complex game for vengeance.

She, more than he, is liable to let herself _care._

But there is, as ever, a counterpoint, even if she will not say it. She, more than he, has been capable of doing what is necessary even despite care. She, more than he, has pushed for necessity over care.

She, more than he, knows when to set necessity aside to let her brother’s rare care for others remain unharmed.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
Vision is easy to lure in, easy to trick to caring. He is, Wanda thinks, so innocent, and that makes this part of it all easier even as it will make later parts harder. It is like luring a bird in with feed and trust and gentleness, only to snap its neck.

Wanda knows how to lure people in. She especially knows how to lure Vision in, remembers being much like him once, before cynicism and the twisting possessiveness she and her brother share had ruined it. She knows where to express interest, how to glance, how to encourage ideas without saying a single word. She knows how to work with the innocence, how not to taint it, how to keep it perfectly intact so that, even as Vision begins to cough and choke he will not notice the noose about his neck.

Wanda is, after all, the better one at understanding people.

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
“Sometimes,” Vision confides in Wanda when they are out at the park, Pietro strolling along behind them as a chaperone. “Sometimes I find it so hard to believe you are interested in me. Near every woman I know prefers my father or none at all.”

Wanda smiles, a small and secret smile. “I,” she says, “am not any other woman.” They stroll a few paces more in silence and Wanda carefully loops her arm through Vision’s. “Besides,” she says. “I prefer those who take _time_ to think, not those who rush into new thoughts without pause.”

“Ah,” Vision says, Oxford-acquired accent coming through crisp and clear even in his half-surprise. “Well I certainly do that, I think.” He smiles, a beautifully shy thing, and Wanda might almost let herself feel something for him if it weren’t so essential she did not. “Indeed,” Vision continues, smile still so beautifully shy, “Some might say I _over-_ think things.”

 

* * *

 

 **vi.  
** “It’s a risk,” Pietro points out that evening. “If he does overthink things. He might overthink your kindness, might overthink _all_ of this, he might _escape-”_

“No one has ever escaped me yet,” Wanda points out. “Though they may have escaped _you.”_

Pietro pales - rage, worry, loss and grief - and she sees his knuckles go white in the mirror. She turns, and gently takes his hand. “I know you did not mean to,” she says, stroking over his fist, pressing a kiss to the back of his hand. “But while I might care more for people, it means I know them better. This is a risk, yes, but he will not run from us. Even when the time comes that he should.”

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
Pietro trusts Wanda - of course he does, just as she trusts him, something so absolute, something so deep and old and long-lasting that the mere idea of it being otherwise baffles him wholly - but he cannot help his worry for her, as always and eternal as his trust in her.

Wanda is gentle-hearted, he knows, soft-hearted. Caring and compassionate even when sometimes she shouldn’t be. She can control it - indeed, she controls her compassion better than he does, because he feels it so rarely for those not her that he has never learned - but in this, this last test of their self-control, their last trial before their final vengeance…

He worries. He cannot help it. And out of the burning worry, like a serpent made of ashes, comes coiling a hatred for young Vision Stark.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
Pietro is good with people when he wants to be, even those he hates, and some part of him lives for the smile Wanda gives when he wrangles money from men he knows would have been happy to deny them.

 _For you,_ he has thought each time this was his job. _For you, Wanda._ In many ways Wanda is better than him at this, at _people._ Wanda knows how to make herself impeccable, play people’s uncertainties and fears until they fall into her hands, a perfectly managed dance that he can never hope to replicate. He manages, but Wanda… It is often easier, when Wanda is the one winning them funding.

But that means Pietro must be the one to marry, if Wanda is doing that, and he does not wish to give Luna a new mother.

(More than that: he does not want to betray Wanda again.)

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
“You will never betray me,” Wanda had said, when he had spilled this worry to her one night, one night when they had been _at home_ , tucked together on his bed in his room. The joints of her fingers grazed lightly over his lips almost like a kiss. “Even when you think you do, you never do in the end. Just as, in the end, I will never betray you.”

They were, both of them, shoulder to shoulder staring at the ceiling. He remembers how warm she had been beside him, warm and burning as the fire that drives them, and he has always loved Wanda even as he fears her, fears _for_ her, because she burns so brightly sometimes he fears she might burn them and all that remains of their home down around them.

“The worry,” she had whispered, the pad of her thumb brushing lightly over his lips, and it was all he could do not to lift to the touch, to kiss this barest touch of her skin on his. Her thumb lifted from his lips. “The worry is that we will betray the _plan._ That would be the worst thing of all.”

 

* * *

 

 **x.  
** “Your sister,” Vision says to Pietro, one day, ever so polite, “Tells me you have a daughter?”

Pietro does not like Vision - Stark’s son, that he and Wanda are reduced to this, that, as ever, he might lose Wanda to this game of money and revenge - but if they are to be brothers-in-law he must be polite. He paints a smile on his face and hopes it does not look strained.

“Luna,” he says. “A light in the family home since her mother left.”

Something in Vision’s face shows he realises the mistake he has made in bringing Luna up. His tone is as polite as ever, but almost painfully so as he says, “I am sorry.”

Pietro shrugs, knows how casual acceptance can unsettle. “Crystal chose to leave. She chose to leave Luna behind. Wanda and I have taken care of Luna since, let her know that she is loved for all her mother left.” The smile that graces his face now is a true one, warm and genuinely fond. “Luna is a lovely child. Wanda and I both love her dearly.”

He sees Vision absorb the knowledge, take in the message that most did - that Wanda is caring and nurturing, that she would make a good mother - and not the questions the twins try so hard to avoid answering.

_(Why did Crystal leave at all?)_

At least, Pietro thinks, Wanda has picked someone so naïve they will never think they are at risk, and will never see them for the unnatural creatures they are, that they became long ago.

That will, Pietro thinks, make it easier when the time comes to kill him.

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
Vision hasn’t always seen ghosts, but he has lived in their presence, in their _shadow._

(His brother’s shadow was a vast and oppressive thing, some days, the damage Ultron had done driving their alcoholic father still more towards drink.)

(Sometimes Vision was almost glad that Ultron was dead, and then he felt terrible again.)

What this meant, though - regardless of if he believed the dark shadow in his fever dreams to have been his brother’s ghost or not - was that he knew how to spot those with ghosts weighing down their shoulders, dogging their steps, infiltrating every aspect of their lives.

In means he recognises something of himself in the careful smiles of Wanda Maximoff.

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
“You don’t know anything about them,” his father says, when Vision brings up his intent to propose to Wanda Maximoff. They have not known each other long - barely a month, all told - but Vision recognises something in Wanda; the very same thing that makes his mother call him an old soul.

He may not know much of the twins, but he knows that Pietro does not especially like him, while Wanda seems to look forward to their meetings more than anyone outside of family has in a long time. He knows they have funding for the mining machine they have been working on, which means the board trusts them to know what they are doing. He knows that Pietro has a child from a failed marriage, a daughter that Wanda helps to care for.

He knows that the maybe-ghost of his brother from his fever-dreams had whispered something of fate and twins.

“I wish to marry her,” Vision says to Tony Stark, to Pepper Potts-Stark. “That does not mean she will say _yes.”_

His mother’s smile is gentle as she takes his hands, while his father slumps in his chair. “I think,” his mother says, “that the dearer worry is if you will each say ‘I do’.”

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
The wedding is more expensive than the twins can afford - both monetarily and ostentatiously. There can’t be anyone in the city that doesn’t know that Vision Stark, heir to Stark Industries has wedded the mysterious European Wanda Maximoff and the risk the widespread knowledge brings is only countered by the thankful fact that it was all paid for by the Stark purse.

“I am sure,” Pepper Potts-Stark says, while helping Wanda with a dress-fitting, “That your brother would much prefer to keep the loans he has gained for the mining machine for that and that alone.” She holds up a piece of lace and compares it to another, apparently trying to judge which makes the better overlay. “Besides,” she says with a small smile and oh, Wanda can see where Vision’s smiles come from now - so unlike his father’s but so _very_ like his mother’s. “It is not as though we cannot afford it.”

The wedding is, thankfully, quite simple, something Wanda knows is due to the efforts of Pepper and Vision repeatedly overriding the whims of Stark. The party afterwards is less so, with its myriad intricately connected social stratums to navigate and all of them at the upper edges.

 _I wish Mother were here,_ Wanda thinks as she smiles at _yet another_ well-wisher. _I’m good at people but she was good at courtesy._

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
“There is still time,” Pietro whispers to her after the dinner. She does not need to ask time for what: time to kill Stark to have their vengeance done, time to kill Stark so they have more money, time to kill Stark so this marriage can remain unconsummated, so they are not pieced apart again and again until at last Vision is dead.

Wanda knows, so keenly it almost hurts, that Pietro would kill without hesitation to keep her his. That she would kill without hesitation to keep him hers.

“It would be suspicious,” she points out, one lace-gloved hand gentle on her brother’s cheek. “And we cannot risk that, my love.”

If they had more time, more space, Wanda knows Pietro would kiss her. If there was not the risk of others around them, Pietro would do a great deal for her, remind her how this marriage was nothing but a farce to further their goals, that they always, in the end, belonged to one another before they did anyone else. Instead, so limited, his head simply bows to hers, yielding to her choice.

“I will see you in the morning,” she promises instead, lets her lips graze a kiss onto Pietro’s cheek. “No harm will come to me.”

 

* * *

 

 **xv.**  
Wanda settles at the vanity and starts to unpin her hair before Vision arrives. She knows that others from the party will try to keep him downstairs - likely try to get him drunk, and Wanda knows Pietro is likely to participate in _that_ if not in the encouragement the other men are likely to - and so she has time to unpin her hair, brush it out into the thick dark curtain that so often Pietro helps her manage.

She is only half-done when she hears the door open and close, and Vision’s soft exhale.

“They are quite… exuberant,” Vision says after a moment. “And I did not particularly want to drink much more.”

Wanda sets her hairbrush down with careful fingers, hears the soft _clack_ of the silver against the glossy wood. Her hair is only half done, but all the same she turns and looks at the man now her husband.

He’s leaning against the wall, looking quite tired from all of the people.

“Would you like some help?” he offers, softly smiling. “My mother taught me how to brush out hair. She seemed to think I might need to know how.”

Somehow, despite Wanda’s best efforts, that sets a true smile spreading out over her cheeks. “Please,” she says. “Usually the only one to help me has been my brother. It is hard when there is so much of it.”

Vision pushes off from the wall, his pace an easy lope - that of the somewhat tipsy but not truly drunk. Wanda thinks him oddly graceful. His hands are gentle on her shoulders as she turns back to face the mirror, and she sees from the corner of her eye as he picks up the hairbrush.

His hands are gentle on her hair, the brushstrokes smooth and soft, as carefully measured as when Pietro does this. It is almost easy to imagine it _is_ Pietro doing this, brushing out her hair for her as he always does, even as it is, instead, Vision.

Her hair is brushed out slowly, smoothly, into the thick dark curtain it usually becomes under Pietro’s skilled hands. The hairbrush is set down with a soft sound and Wanda half turns, looks up to where Vision stands beside her.

“Would you be as so kind to unlace me? I thought I would have more time to prepare.”

Vision’s fingers fumble slightly on the laces - something Pietro’s fingers would never do, but she supposes it is not fair to judge him based on Pietro, Pietro who has had all their lives to get it right - but finally they are undone and Wanda breathes freely. The corset she slips off, and the shift beneath it. She thinks she shocks Vision slightly, walking naked towards the bed, but she does not settle on it, only plucks up the nightgown waiting there and dons it.

She turns to look at him - Vision, crimson-faced, still stood by the vanity.

“Husband?” she says, extending a hand. “Shall we go to bed?”

 

* * *

 

 **xvi.  
** Vision takes her hand but still seems quite uncertain even as Wanda settles herself on the edge of the bed.

“I-I have never-” Vision stutters, expression half ashamed and half apologetic.

… Well, Wanda does not quite know what to do with that. She supposes she should be grateful, a chance to avoid the wifely duties she does not care to complete. She had not enjoyed them before, never has with any but Pietro who is so very dear to her, but she had planned for it to happen anyway, because it was expected.

So much was _expected_ for the farce to work.

“Wanda?” Vision asks. He is settled on the bed now, beside her, his hands kept politely on his knees.

Her smile to him is small, almost nervous. She supposes she is nervous, really, reacting to an unexpected response. “I’m all right,” she says. “And it is all right.” She shrugs one shoulder, lets her nightgown shift over her skin, down her arm. Her smile now is wider, is more softly shy, with the mildest, mildest touch of the flirtatious. “It is not as though I have any more experience than you.”

She does though. Very much more. Experiences which she knows he likely cannot compare to.

But then, none love her quite as Pietro does. None love Pietro quite as she does.

“I would not wish to hurt you,” Vision says. “And… I would rather wait until we are both ready.” His smile - oh his _smile_. Such a small shy thing, so truly innocent and genuine, in the way only Vision can be. It feels as though there are moths in her chest, gentle feathery wings and antennae brushing over her heart and ribs. “Besides,” he says. “It is not as though we must. Not if we do not want to.”

 

* * *

 

 **xvii.**  
Wanda is smiling when Pietro sees her in the morning. Smiling as she never has before or after such a night and for a moment Pietro thinks that-

But no. She would not smile like that even if it had not been awful. She would only smile like that if it had been nothing at all.

She does not sit next to him at breakfast - she cannot, she is married now and there are _expectations_ and oh, oh how Pietro hates these expectations that bind them into shapes they are not meant to be. Wanda is smiling though, small and gentle and warm and pleased and Pietro cannot find it in himself to hate quite as wholly as he has every time before.

 _Maybe,_ he considers, _It is not quite so fair to hate Vision if he lets Wanda smile like this._ But-

 _Only each other._ The snake of hatred, burning like embers so hot as to blister skin, wraps around the idea, strangles it. _Only each other_ was the promise, and Vision has no part in that.

 

* * *

 

 **xviii.**  
Vision says his farewells to his parents at the train station, Wanda says her _adieu_ to Pietro.

“I will miss you,” Pietro says, and already he can feel it, the ache at the base of his heart, weighing it down in his chest like lead. That he is going home to Luna, that he will see his daughter again for the first time in months is only so much of a benefit when it means he must be without Wanda. Even with Luna there the house feels empty without his sister present.

“I will miss you too,” Wanda says, one hand cupping his cheek and he tilts his head into her touch slightly, trying to prolong the goodbye. “I will be safe,” she promises. “It is only for a little while.”

 _Maybe,_ Pietro thinks. _But it will feel like so much longer._ Before him, Wanda lets out a long exhale.

“Give my love to Luna,” she murmurs. “And take care.”

 

* * *

 

 **xix.**  
Wanda watches Pietro receding on the platform and sighs. She is glad she is allowed this, at least, that she does not have to pretend to be unaffected in saying goodbye to her brother. This may be a honeymoon, may be intended as happy but Vision knows, at least, that they are close, that they have rarely been apart for long.

Beside her Vision takes her hand, gently, says, softly, “It is never easy to be without that which you have always had.”

But he does not know the truth, nor the extent. He cannot know.

 

* * *

 

 **xx.**  
Though they share a cabin on the train they do not share a bed - not that it would be easy to do, with how narrow the beds are - and Vision does not press to. Even at their first stop, when they finally have a hotel room and a bed, he keeps his distance, observes some measure of space. Again, on the boat, the space is observed, as they travel through Europe…

Even as Wanda is glad of it, pleased she does not have to play some farce, lie yet more to Vision who does not expect it at all, it is…

She does not know how to feel. None have observed such space, offered such simple respect before. Even Pietro has pushed, but then she has pushed back, with Pietro, for they have both needed before, and both known the other would never deny them.

But Vision offers simple space, shows affection gently and softly, offers no weight to follow it. This is not like Pietro where every piece of affection is doubled with purpose, where every touch holds meaning and intent.

It is only Vision’s naïveté that allows Wanda to think it true kindness.

 

* * *

 

 **xxi.**  
“You do not have to keep such distance,” Wanda says to Vision one day. They are walking through a park, trees starting to lose their glossy leaves, and their arms are loosely linked. If it were Pietro at her side they would be leaning into each other, arms linked so tightly they would almost be able to feel the other’s pulse even through their sleeve. Were it Pietro she would not even be having this discussion.

Indeed, she wonders why she is having this discussion at all - surely she should _want_ this, want this space from Vision. Want space from anyone who isn’t her brother.

But Vision’s smiles are still small, gentle, shy things, so innocent and well-meaning that she cannot think unkindly of him, cannot make him some separate creature to make him easy to hurt.

In truth, Wanda thinks, she does not want to hurt him at all.

The smile Vision offers her is shy, still, but more confused than sweet. “Pardon?” he asks. “I do not-”

Wanda smiles, lets a touch of warmth into it, and tucks their arms closer. “You do not have to keep such a distance,” she says, “just because we keep distance elsewhere. Not if you do not _want_ to.”

The smile Vision gives her this time is sweet, now, if still shy, and Wanda’s smile turns very briefly fond.

 

* * *

 

 **xxii.  
** They arrive _home,_ and Wanda is, as ever, glad mostly to see her brother again, to see Luna. It is Luna who greets her and Vision as they enter, sprinting from the main room, skirting the pile of peeling paint and dead leaves and chips of plaster that graces the vast entrance hall. Wanda kneels, opens her arms and embraces her laughing niece, her dark hair mixing with Luna’s pale.

“It is good to see you again Luna,” Wanda says, rising. It is easy to step back and gesture to Vision. “This is my husband, Vision. He will be your uncle, just as I am your aunt. Vision, this is Luna, my lovely niece.” It is easy, too, to gently take Luna’s hand and let her walk with them up the stairs, asking Vision questions about America.

“Papa is in the attic,” Luna says when they get to the room that is to be Wanda and Vision’s. “There were letters.”

Wanda presses a kiss to her niece’s forehead, squeezes her husband’s hand. “I shall go and see what has my brother so caught up. Luna, would you be as so kind as to show Vision where everything is?”

 

* * *

 

 **xxiii.**  
She finds Pietro in his room, poring over letters. Two are set to one side - one addressed to her and one to Vision - but he has three before him that are undoubtedly to do with the machine below.

For several long moments Wanda stays in the doorway, simply watching. Once this had been a game - would the other notice or would they have to get their attention? But it has been so long since last they saw each other - almost a _month_ \- and that longing overrides any playfulness.

“Pietro?”

Wanda has always loved the bright expressive blue of her brother’s eyes and notes the joy-surprise-relief that fills them in the moment they meet hers before she is wrapped in his arms. Pietro’s embraces are so often this; warm, encompassing things, almost desperate, almost needy in their earnestness. Wanda wraps her arms around her brother and relaxes.

“I’ve missed you,” Pietro breathes, his exhale ruffling her hair. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“I’ve missed you too,” Wanda says, and her hands have already found his hair, are already combing through soothingly as Pietro whispers: “I’ve been having such nightmares while you were gone.”

It is an easy thing - a _simple_ thing - to turn her head to kiss him. It is a needed thing - a _necessary_ thing - to stop before they get carried too far.

“Tonight,” Wanda promises. “I will help you with your nightmares tonight.”

 

* * *

 

 **xxiv.  
** Wanda sighs into Pietro’s mouth, runs a hand over the bare skin of his side as his hands comb through her hair, as his fingers tangle in the strands. This is unnatural they know. Wrong, they know. This is a thing they must deny even as it is so very key to them.

They are one soul in two bodies in so many ways, halves of each other, bound to each other, inseparable, filling in the gaps of each other, personality and mentality and the physical world. They are twins with no one else left in the world and-

Wanda presses kisses along her brother’s jaw, teases touches down her brother’s sides. Pietro’s hands are gentle over her skin, his breath hot against her skin.

 _Does it matter what the world thinks?_ Wanda wonders as they slip together. _We have each other. That is all we will ever need._

 

* * *

 

 **xxv.  
** “I woke at the wind,” Vision says in the morning. “Late in the night. You weren’t there.”

“A nightmare,” Wanda says. “Luna had one, that I had not come back safely. Pietro says she has been having them at least since he got back. I went to stay with her.”

Vision smiles - that shy and gentle smile of his - and if she was willing to let herself she would feel terrible for this small lie. But she cannot afford to, not in this complex game.

In its way, that hurts more.

 

* * *

 

 **xxvi.**  
Vision’s presence in the house is small. He does not take up space, or demand attention like those before him had; he is more like Luna, unassuming and slipping in amongst the shadows, through the vast open hall, adapting to the place as though it is his nature, as though he _belongs._ There is no weight to his presence, he does not warp a room as he enters it, tug attention to him. He simply… _is,_ a presence waiting, when Wanda turns, with his soft shy, smile.

It feels incredibly natural for him to be here, to spend time amongst the books when Wanda is playing the piano, to walk the grounds, to share her bed.

It worries Wanda, slightly, that he fits in so well, that it seems so _right_ for him to be here. Maybe Pietro is right, maybe she is far more attached to him than she should be, maybe she should have held off on this, maybe they should, simply, have killed Stark rather than planned to steal his son away and kill him.

But she is strong too, she knows that. She has certainty as much as her brother, can be just as cruel when she must. But so often she sees reason not to be cruel, to offer kindness. Pietro did not care for many, kept his love wrapped close around them both, only stretching to Luna by virtue of blood, close-knit around family.

That he had loved Crystal…

She was not so cruel as to punish her brother for a thing he had never done before. A thing neither of them had ever even thought _possible._ Was she so cruel as to punish herself though? The only one she had truly wanted dead had been the first, Strucker who Pietro had pushed to fall through the roof. All others… it was necessity and not anything more.

 _Is this any different?_ Wanda asks herself. _Is it the same as before? Or is this more? Am I doing to Pietro as he did to me?_

It is not an easy question to answer.

 

* * *

 

 **xxvii.**  
Home means this: her brother, with her. Home means this: Vision, somehow slipping into the house, somehow fitting as though he was meant to be there, as though he was a part of it all. Home means this: the winds, howling, as winter draws near. The sounds of the men outside, building the machines to mine still more clay - and oh, Wanda sometimes fears what their mother might have said but they have so few other ways to continue. No farms. No animals or crops. Wanda does not want to kill, to see others dead for their gain.

So they mine the clay that is as scarlet as heartsblood.

Home means many things. For a long time, to Wanda, home has been simplicity, been safety, been acceptance. Been the one place she does not have to hide, unless they are in the midst of their deception, their returning farces.

Despite the farce… Wanda does not feel so near as much an urge to hide as she feels she should.

“It feels almost as though we are safe,” she tells Pietro one evening. They are curled together, Wanda’s head on his shoulder, his fingers tangling through her hair, gently tugging at the strands as he finger-combs her curls to order.

“We aren’t,” Pietro says. “We never are.”

“Maybe,” Wanda says. “But it _feels_ as though we might be.”

Far below - two floors beneath - Vision sleeps, unaware. Wanda almost wants to tell him, so there are no lies. Almost wants to end the farce. She can’t, she knows. She has felt this urge before, this desire to keep others from harm, this … she does not know what to call it except what it is: soft-heartedness. But she has not felt it to this extent, and so dangerous an extent at that! She wants to speak and yet she can’t and so she won’t. She knows, too, that telling him would hurt him just as much, that telling him would make them unsafe, that it is such a risk. That just because it seems as though he fits here does not change that.

She cannot _let_ it change that. Cannot hope that it means that it might change that.

“You are safe,” Pietro murmurs, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “You are as safe as I can make you. As safe as you have managed to make yourself.”

Wanda can sense the note of pride in his voice, and it takes her a moment to parse what it is at before-

“I did not think his gentleness extended so far,” she murmurs. “But he is… so willing to keep a distance, to wait, as he has said, until we are _both_ ready. I do not think he realises that I will never be ready. That he will be dead before it could even be possible.”

Pietro hums assent and understanding, knots his fingers in her hair, tugs gently so her face turns up towards his. “Beloved,” he murmurs, breath ghosting over her lips.

Wanda’s eyes half-close, a smile spreads over her cheeks. “My love,” she whispers.

Pietro’s cheek is slightly rough with stubble as he presses it to hers, his lips kissing a line along her jaw. “I will keep us safe,” he promises. “If anything should change.”

 

* * *

 

 **xxviii.**  
The hall is a surprising thing to Vision. Oh, his father’s house had been a large thing, beautiful and new and filled with shiny knickknacks and remarkable gadgets, most of which his father had built himself. It was beautiful and grand but…

The hall is something else to Vision, something else entirely. It is vast and almost ominous, hunched on the hill like some waiting creature, and inside it is full of vast dark spaces, bleakly illuminated in light that already seems wintry though it is only just turning to autumn. There is something sparsely beautiful to it all, almost simple, none of the ostentatious grandeur of home.

He finds he quite likes it.

 

* * *

 

 **xxix.**  
There is something… pleasing, about Wanda being home. Something _freeing._ He feels almost as though he can breathe again, as though his chest is not so tight with worry. It is, still, he knows, because they will not be safe until Vision is gone but… Wanda is home. There is a peace in that, in watching Wanda make her way around the house, as at home here as he is, as Luna is.

Maximoffs, at home in this hall that has always been theirs.

 

* * *

 

 **xxx.**  
Vision… does not think he should be so unsettled by the house even as he loves it. It is beautiful to him, and a place he does quite like but… he shakes his head as he walks, thinks, _it must only be the wind._ It wakes him often, that wind, and more often than not Wanda is not there beside him. The house is Wanda’s home, he knows, a place she is and has always been safe in, knows that, even in the middle of the night, the house holds no fear for her as it might Luna - whose nightmares must continue unabated for Wanda to be so often gone. He knows that she is perfectly safe to walk through its shadowed halls in the depths of the night.

The house _fits_ Wanda, wraps around her in light or in shadow, almost lovingly. She _fits_ the house, its beauty an accompaniment to hers, her beauty accentuating its own. Home for him has never been wholly _home,_ simply a place where he lives. Home was his father in his garage, tinkering, his mother trying to manage Father’s business, his brother causing trouble, a house full of servants and designed to look perfect to anyone visiting. It was not a home as this house is to Wanda, a place which wraps around her and seems as though to be a part of her.

But… it still unsettles him slightly, the house, and, he supposes, how often he wakes with Wanda gone. Not just that he wakes but that she is always gone when he does. He knows children can have nightmares often - knows he and his brother had plenty - but nightly seems so drastic to him he almost thinks they should take Luna to see a doctor. Maybe the house at night scares Luna too. It is possible, he thinks, but… Luna has lived here all her life, surely, it should not scare her so. But the house at night does unsettle _him_ so and yet he finds it so welcoming in the day.

The house, like Wanda, changes in the night, goes from bleak beauty and vastly lit spaces to ominous caverns, a shadowed grace like a cats’. Wanda too is like a cat, friendly and pacing in the day, present and warm, happy to play at her piano or read or play with Luna, contented like a cat in the sun, but at night vanished, slipping off into shadows. Vision knows what she has said - that it is Luna’s nightmares - and he believes her, believes her quite utterly, knows Wanda would not lie about Luna’s wellbeing, not with how dearly she loves her niece. All the same the presence of nightmares even in the bleak beauty of this place, the bleak beauty which turns so tenebrous and ominous each night…

Vision supposes that there are two sides to everything. That night shows another side that daylight cannot and can never reveal, makes the house turn from one thing into another, go from vast and almost distant spaces to cold oppressiveness, makes daylit corridors turn into fuliginous tunnels.

It makes the kind and loving Wanda-of-the-day vanish like a ghost each night, go from tangible and real to some chasing phantom, gone from existence and no longer a presence in their bed.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxi.**  
“We must go down to the village soon,” Wanda says one morning. “Machine parts will have arrived, and the books we ordered for Luna. In a few days there may well be letters too.”

Pietro’s glance up from his food is cursory, but he nods quickly before turning to Luna beside him and helping her cut her toast, balance her egg on top of it on her fork. “Next week,” he says, “if the weather permits. You should take the carriage.”

Wanda’s smile is small and fond. “Yes,” she says. “Perhaps Vision should accompany me, if you will be busy managing the machine?”

For a moment Vision swears Pietro’s eyes narrow, watching Wanda keenly, but then all of sudden they are again relaxed and he nods. “Yes,” he says with slight smile. “Show him the village.”

Breakfast continues almost as though nothing has been said, Pietro focussed on his daughter, Luna focussed on her father and Wanda eating almost daintily, smiling across the table at him and, at one point, stretching out a hand to squeeze his.

It is odd to Vision to see this... odd dance the twins seem to play. They are so readily at ease with each other, so happy in each other’s presence and Vision supposes that is from a close siblinghood as opposed to the odd rivalry Ultron had had with him. But they interact precisely, almost as though pitching a tennis ball back and forth, putting a decision into the other’s side of the court and catching the rebound with perfect acceptance. They match each other, mirror each other, and sometimes Vision wonders at how they watch each other.

He’s seen Pietro standing, silent and still, at the doorway of a room, watching his sister just until she starts to turn before seeming to ghost away and vanish. He never knows what to make of the expression on his brother-in-law’s face, some mingled affection and worry, as though concerned for Wanda’s health. But Wanda seems quite well, fine in America, fine as they had travelled and practically thriving now she is in her home, her family’s hall.

And yet Pietro seems to almost haunt her footsteps - when not tending his machine or his daughter - like a peculiarly tangible ghost.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxii.** **  
** It is hard to sleep soundly every night, with this howling wind, with his thoughts as they are, and so Vision takes to wandering the halls on their floor, to wandering downstairs and finding books to read until the wind does not unsettle him as much.

Sometimes he does not read and merely thinks instead, ponders out his observances of the house. The small carvings that detail the main hall, the worn paintings that he can only just make out. The bright pattern of the huge circular window in the library that illuminates the room with bright sunlight or dim moonlight and how well Wanda fits in each, her brother like a shadow behind her, Luna like a happy and bright butterfly fluttering alongside her aunt or father, nothing like the dark moths Wanda showed him in the attic.

Sometimes he walks through the house and sees shadows where there should not be shadows and winds when no air ruffles against his skin.

Ghosts are not real - Vision knows this, he has always known this, just like he knows that the sight he’d seen of his brother in the fever after Ultron’s death was most likely nothing but a fever dream or a hallucination - but these shadows… they are _there_ so undoubtedly and each time he looks and looks again they seem more certain, as though his seeing them helps to carve them out of the shadows and the dripping scarlet clay that seeps from the walls.

Vision sleeps, and tries his best to stave off the grasping bony fingers of his nightmares.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxiii.  
** There are ghosts in the house… except Vision does not _believe_ in ghosts. Vision has never believed in ghosts before now, even when he thought he might have seen his brother’s face, but at this house, with these apparitions…

Even Vision cannot help but consider it possible.

There are, he has noticed, two which appear hand-in-hand together, pitiful wasted corpses that loom out of midnight shadows or watch from alcoves. There are three horrible blood red creatures which appear alone, though, and these are the ones which try to _touch_ him. There are a woman and two men, one man with limbs all a-broken, the remaining two clutching at their throats as though choked.

Vision may have only just started believing in ghosts but he is quite certain that all five died right here, in the house.

But he has no idea what they might want with him.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxiv.**  
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Vision asks one morning. Wanda is carefully dressing herself, somehow managing to pull the laces of her corset tight - though not quite as tight as when he’d unlaced them for her he notices - without seeing them, simply tugging on the laces as they loop around her hands.

“Of course,” Wanda says. “The hills are full of them. This whole area has a history of magic.” She inhales, tugs on the laces one last time and begins to tie them with the skill of years of practice. “Why do you ask?”

“Last night,” Vision says. “I could not sleep, so I went to the library to read. I thought I saw something in the shadows. Almost like one of the shadows _moved.”_

 

* * *

 

 **xxxv.  
** “He says he saw someone,” Wanda tells Pietro. It is early in the morning still, and usually Wanda is not downstairs at this hour, but here she is, putting together a breakfast tray. “Someone who wasn’t there, who might’ve been a ghost.”

Her hands are shaking as she sets down the teapot, her arms are too as Pietro’s hands wrap gently around them. In the draughtiness of the rest of the house his body heat is usually sharply noticeable, but here, in the warmth of the kitchen it is more soothing than anything. Wanda relaxes as Pietro pulls her gently backwards, holds her warmly to his chest.

“They cannot hurt you,” Pietro reminds her. “Stark killed our parents, I killed anyone who would have hurt us. To the dead you are innocent.”

Wanda is not and she knows it - she lured in as many as her brother and let him kill them all, but: “That is not what I fear,” she whispers, as Pietro tilts his head to nose gently at her hair, to press a kiss to her cheekbone. “He is Stark’s _son._ Our parents might try to kill him themselves and the others-”

Pietro goes still against her, his breath a soft exhale over her cheek and by her ear. “The others might try to warn him.” He steps back so quickly that even in the warmth of the kitchen Wanda’s shoulders briefly feel cold.

“One of us should stay with him,” Wanda says. “At least until I can make a charm against the ghosts.”

Her hands, as she walks upstairs, do not shake.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxvi.**  
The charm is a simple thing, made how Mother had made them once. The rib of a rat, to mark the dead, and a sprig of rowan to mark the living and to confer protection. Tied together with red string - string that had been white until bathed in the heartsblood of the hills - and slid to Vision at breakfast.

“It will keep the ghosts from you,” Wanda says softly. “From haunting you, from harming you.”

Vision takes it delicately, runs his fingertips over the bone and the sprig, catches the dangling thread of string in his palm for a moment.

“Mother would make them,” Wanda admits quietly, and she can feel her cheeks warming. “To keep the farmers safe when someone died.”

The smile Vision gives her is small and gentle, a strangely warming thing that makes her warm cheeks warmer still. “Thank you,” he says, leaning across the table to kiss her cheek. “I shall keep it on me always.”

 

* * *

 

 **xxxvii.  
** Wanda watches from a room upstairs as Pietro walks around the machine outside. Luna is balanced on his hip, and he’s gesturing widely - presumably telling her how each part works, what they’re doing now to try to make it work - and something in her heart aches that she cannot have this. She is Luna’s aunt, no more, and even the _chance_ of it being otherwise is a thing they cannot, could never afford. Crystal _was_ Luna’s mother and more often than not she is thankful for this fact, thankful that any person in the village will attest to having seen the previous Lady Maximoff throughout her pregnancy, sometimes holding onto her sister-in-law’s arm as it progressed.

Luna is not hers for all that, sometimes, she and Pietro might wish it, and they cannot afford a child of their own, one that is theirs and none-others.

Outside, Pietro turns to look at his daughter, Luna smiling widely enough that Wanda can see it even at this distance. Even only seeing the back of Pietro’s head she knows her brother must have smiled before pressing a kiss to Luna’s forehead, shifting her on his hip, and striding around the machine again.

Pietro had never thought he’d make a good father, she remembered, and sometimes she’d feared that his viciousness and occasional capriciousness made that certain. _How wrong we’ve been proven,_ she thinks, watching Pietro and Luna outside.

(Something in her heart half-wonders - might she be allowed this with Vision?)

 

* * *

 

 **xxxviii.**  
Pietro thinks a lot about observances. He thinks about observing people and observing the rules they dictate. He observes very few of these rules, unless they are set by Wanda or it is asked of him by Wanda. Observance is odd, in so many ways but… he will always observe Wanda. Her rules are final, her decisions absolute. He may _say_ something, he may _ask_ something but to deny her… that would be like her denying him, such a rarity, such a striking oddity that they each regard such denials as an absolute forbiddance, a law that can never and must never be broken lest they break each other.

He observes Wanda in many ways - observes the rules she sets down and abides by them, observes what she does and who she interacts with that he might ensure she stays safe. Sometimes he simply observes her because she is _Wanda,_ so absolute an anchor in his life that he feels drawn back to her always.

Now, in the house, the hall stretching high above them, shadows and bleak light both, he observes Wanda and Vision. The snake, burning with jealousy and anger and hatred twists in his chest but he tucks that back, cannot let that out now, not while the farce must still be allowed to play out, played out until its final end. But it is there, searing its coils into his sternum and ribs, twisting its way around his heart until he feels as though each moment burns.

Wanda is easy with Vision, relaxed. She has always had some ease with those they have lured in - she _understands_ people, she is so soft-hearted and so capable of compassion and gentleness where he is not so at all - but something about this strikes him as different, some other ease which makes the serpent twist tighter. Maybe - he hopes, just _maybe_ \- it is only that ease that Vision seems to have, so accepting of the hall and the hall so accepting of him that he rests in it with ease, like a moth balanced on a leaf where a spider might make it dip.

Maybe it is only that, and Pietro does not dare to consider otherwise.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxix.**  
Vision has such ease with the house now it would almost unsettle Wanda if it did not, for some reason, please her. He walks through each corridor with ease and calm - though he does not yet know how to do so silently, so she hears his creaking approach from rooms away - and sits so easily in the library Wanda might almost think he is meant to be there.

At first it had been almost unsettling, to see another slipping so readily into the house, had been odd at the very least but now she finds herself welcoming it. Perhaps, she thinks, they do not need to kill for vengeance, perhaps, instead, they can simply make him _understand._ Vision is so very understanding after all, so readily accepting, still keeping his distance because he wishes for them both to be ready, for them both to _chose_ and Wanda still does not have the heart to tell him she never will.

He is good with Luna too, and it is almost awful how Wanda must ask Luna to lie about nightmares she has not had - Luna has nightmares, yes, but they are rare and scattered - so that her deception can remain undamaged.

Wanda does not want to lie - she never does, in truth, but it is a necessity of vengeance - but seeing Vision so readily settled into their home, so peaceably in place, almost as though he is meant to be there?

Wanda _hates_ the lies, hates that they plan still to kill him.

He has accepted the house, settled into it. He has accepted her and given her space, even if he has not yet grasped that she will never let that distance close. He is kind to Luna, is accepted by the house and oh Wanda _hopes_ that they may yet make him understand, and will not have to hurt him.

Even if Pietro still does not trust him.

 

* * *

 

 **xl.**  
“We have to kill him soon,” Pietro says. His tone is calm but beneath the surface - Wanda has always known Pietro to be possessive of her, of their bond, remembers clearly how Pietro had killed her first husband, pushing him from the roof after she had had the least argument with her spouse.

Pietro’s protective-possessive streak had killed Strucker then, had killed his first wife, her second husband - albeit less messily. It had killed others too, those who would have threatened them, who might have ruined the farce.

This was, Wanda knows, part of the plan from the beginning. To kill Vision, to take vengeance on Stark, to have money enough to live free and safe as once they had with their parents until Stark Industries had stripped that from them.

Wanda presses her face to her brother’s chest where they lie together and finds that, for once, she _minds_ her brother’s possessiveness. Finds that it is not so reassuring as once it was. She can feel his fingers tangling through her hair, calm casualness that comes from so many years of each other and none else.

It is an odd feeling, to resent belonging to her twin in the way they always have. Is this what Pietro felt when she had reminded him that they had to kill Crystal and Luna? This absolute denial and refusal, strong as the frozen clay, that had started from so simple a thing as a creeping reluctance, worrying her stomach like fluttering moths? How could something so soft and simple turn so absolute, iron-hard like iced clay? Wanda thinks she might now understand why Pietro did not tell her so swiftly when Crystal happened.

“Don’t,” she whispers. Her fingertips tap over the skin of her brother’s collarbones, she can feel the bones themselves - so delicately strong, like so many things about them both - just beneath. “Please do not kill him.” She tilts her head, lets out an uneasy breath. “Not yet.”

 

* * *

 

 **xli.**  
Some part of her wants to keep them both - the brother that has always been there, is as good as a part of her, and the man she loves, her law-bound husband - but she knows it can never be. Knows Pietro’s jealousy, knows Vision would not understand, and it aches, that she cannot have this, cannot have both that she loves, that one would make her choose, would expect her to pick him because she always has while the other…

Wanda thinks Vision would simply leave, if she tried to keep both of them in her heart, and that, of all things she has been through, might just break it.

 

* * *

 

 **xlii.**  
“The weather is clear,” Wanda says one morning. “I think I should show Vision the village today, and get the machine parts at last, before the snows hit. Luna’s books will have arrived at last as well,” she adds, and smiles at her niece. “Would you like that, my dear, to have some new books to read?”

Luna’s smile is answer enough, and the worried tilt of Pietro’s mouth eases just slightly. “Take care,” he says. “Get your coat and scarf and I will see the carriage readied.”

 

* * *

 

 **xliii.**  
Wanda knows the men of the village, the men at the depot. She has known almost all of them since she was a child and had taken them food and medicine and charms with Mother or had seen them talking to Father. They know her as the Lady Maximoff, respect her as such and take to Vision with the same readiness as they had her last two husbands, though she admits they seem to like him better with his soft smiles and gentle interest.

She checks the machine parts with practiced fingers, takes the metal out and taps it to hear if it rings true, before setting each back amongst their wood shavings and straw padding. The letters she fetches too, and gives the two letters addressed to Vision to her husband who opens them with an almost childish eagerness. It is not so surprising, she thinks, when the last letter he received was when he had first arrived.

Some part of her cannot help but be glad that he is so caught up in his letters he will likely never learn from the men the truth of the house and its past.

Her own letters are far more staid - the money required for the upkeep of the hall (thankfully paid from Vision’s accounts now shared with her), letters back from potential governesses for Luna, one from someone who had heard they intended to reopen the mines and inquiring as to the price of the clay - and she settles at the desk the depot manager cedes to her to pen her replies. When they are done she sits for a moment with the wife of the depot manager, shares a cup of tea and polite conversation while Vision pens his own letters, learning the stories and needs of the village so she might know how to help.

Eventually, however, tea is finished, and Wanda sits peaceably in the main room, leafing through Luna’s new books while she waits for her husband.

 

* * *

 

 **xliv.**  
“Does the weather usually turn this quickly?” Vision asks from behind her and Wanda turns to see the clouds darkening, snow already falling in swift flurries.

“Oh _no,”_ Wanda whispers, mind fixed on her brother back at the house. He will see the snow, yes, but they have dawdled, here, by rights they should be on the way back and if that were the case they would just make it home in time. Now, with this snow, they will not and Pietro will worry, will worry himself _sick,_ fear she has been caught in the storm and might even race out into it in hopes of finding her. She hopes he will not - knows that Luna’s presence might well restrain him at least a measure - but it is a worry all the same. “We should have set off earlier,” Wanda says, “written letters at the hall and brought them down when the weather cleared, now…”

“You can stay here,” the depot manager says. “There’s a spare room in case of this. I’ll set the fireplace and get some blankets out, my lady.”

 

* * *

 

 **xlv.**  
They are given a meal too, because the villagers remember when Wanda’s mother gave them food in turn, and Wanda and Vision retire pleasantly full and find the awaiting room pleasingly warm.

“They all seemed to know you,” Vision says as he unlaces his boots. Wanda settles in a chair, starts to comb out her hair. Vision, boots and coat removed, walks over, takes the comb and gently starts brushing out Wanda’s hair.

“They know _us,”_ Wanda says, “Pietro and I. Our family has been here so long… they cannot _not_ know us. Mother used to bring them food when we had an excess. They worked the fields well and so we gave back to them - food, medicine when they were sick, the charms Mother made. Even now that we cannot do so so readily there is still… balance. An understanding.”

Vision’s hands are gentle in her hair, fingertips soft as they graze over her scalp, press softly to the skin of her brow and ears and neck as he combs out her hair. It feels like almost no time at all before her hair is combed out into its dark curtain, curls shining in the light from the fireplace.

“Unlace me?” Wanda asks, and Vision’s hands are there again, gentle things plucking the laces loose. He still does not have the ease that Pietro does but there is a stumbling grace to it, something almost endearing in how he has improved since that first night.

The bed is… not a _narrow_ thing, but it is not wide enough for them to sleep at that careful distance they have kept. Vision takes one look at it, one look at Wanda and moves as though to take the chair Wanda had sat in earlier before she catches his hand.

She does not know entirely why she does this - the distance was a fine thing, a good thing, even if she has some affection for Vision it does not mean she should _act_ on it - but she catches his hand all the same. “We are husband and wife,” she says. “We _can_ share a bed.”

Vision’s eyes are slightly wider than usual, their odd bright green seeming brighter as they catch the light of the fire. “You are certain?” he asks, fingers squeezing hers with the barest pressure. “You do not-”

Wanda kisses him. It is brief and gentle and Wanda is quite certain that is probably not the best of ideas but… it has built in her like sunlight warmth spilling over the floor, affection and fondness, endearing moments and fragments of outright love until she is full of it, feeling as though she is glowing and Vision, now, still so gentle…

His eyes are still wide when she pulls back, as her hand squeezes his with more certainty. “I am certain,” she says. “Quite, quite certain.”

Vision’s eyes are still wide as she says this, he is still silent. Then: “You do not have to decide,” he says, even as his gaze flickers down to her lips, his expression half-nervous. “Wanda-”

“You do not have to either,” she says, and she is smiling and happy and full of love and: “It is a choice. I know mine, Vision. The rest is yours.”

 

* * *

 

 **xlvi.**  
Vision may lack experience but he makes up for it in care. Wanda knows love, knows how it warms her, fills her body from hips to throat, bright and shining as the sun. She knows how it can _feel,_ her brother’s hot breath on her cheek, his lips on hers, on her jaw, on her neck, her nipples.

But that… she thinks now that the love of those couplings was half _possession,_ of marking them each as the others, their cyclical ownership of each other, permanent and unchanging.

This is…

This is something else entirely.

Vision’s lips are tentative and teasing on hers, soft and uncertain as they press kiss after kiss to her neck and shoulder, collarbone and breasts. His fingers are gentle on her legs, as they stroke over her belly, and carry none of the desperate possessive passion Pietro’s touches always do.

 _Pietro-_ Wanda almost wants to stop, knows that her doing this will hurt him. _Only each other,_ that had been their promise - to trust, to love, to own - _only each other._

But he had let himself love Crystal in some fashion, have _this_ with Crystal, love Luna, born from him breaking his promise to her. Wanda wraps her legs around Vision - her _husband,_ a man she _loves_ \- wraps her legs around him to draw him still closer.

Pietro had broken his promise. Pietro had had _this_ with another.

Wanda had _allowed_ him that, with no reprimand at all.

It was only fair for him to allow her this in turn.

Vision’s lips are soft things, his fingers gentle. Pietro and she have not been gentle in long years - even to each other, the strength of their possessiveness had overridden so much softness they could have had, had limited it to so few interactions, all designed to calm and soothe.

They had not been gentle in so long she had almost forgot just how _freeing_ it felt.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Vision whispers, and Wanda simply pulls him closer, presses a kiss, firm and warm to his lips, lets her gaze bore into his.

“You won’t,” she promises and finally - _finally_ \- her husband slips inside her.

 

* * *

 

 **xlvii.**  
Vision sleeps peacefully. His head rests on her chest - how many memories does she have of Pietro doing the same? - and she combs her fingers through his hair. Something, coiling up from the bottomless well of dark _possession_ that fills the back of her mind whispers to her, whispers _you should not have done that._

Wanda doesn’t care.

Vision sleeps peacefully, expression serene. Wanda’s fingers comb through his hair - soft strands, dark with tints of red she thinks must have come from Pepper Potts-Stark. Her body still feels warm, she still feels love within her, shining like the sun, as fierce and warm and strong as the anger and vengeance has always been.

Wanda wonders if she even wants vengeance any more.

Vision sleeps peacefully and Wanda thinks, at last, that she really should join him.

 

* * *

 

 **xlviii.**  
Home is…

Home is home. Home is grounding. Home has _Pietro_ and now, no longer quite so giddily full of love, she almost regrets what passed between herself and Vision. Almost.

The house is a looming protection over them as they near it, a safety from the storm that shall build again, a safety from the men of the village who might tell Vision a myriad things he must not be allowed to know. It is home and it is safety, just as much as Pietro is to her, and the knowledge of what she and Vision did waits in her throat like a leaden bird trying desperately to sing.

“Pietro,” she breathes when she finds him in the kitchen. She flies into his arms which wrap like a vice around her, breathes him in as though he is air.

 _Only each other_ had been their promise and here, now, Wanda remembers exactly why breaking it has never, ultimately, ended how they are.

They are halves of each other’s souls.

 

* * *

 

 **xlix.**  
Wanda knows what Pietro would say if she told him - furious, burning, possessive, _“You gave yourself to_ **_him?”_ **

_Yes, Pietro,_ Wanda wants to say. _I did. I love him as I do you._

She knows she can’t. Knows that doing that will turn Pietro wild - not protectively as the fury that had led to him pushing Strucker on the roof, that had caused Strucker to step on a weak beam and fall and crash into the parquet below - but _possessively_ so.

Wanda doesn’t know how Pietro will act, if it is out of possessiveness. She has never feared his possessiveness before, never feared _him,_ not like this.

Wanda wonders if this is how Pietro had felt before they’d learned of Crystal’s pregnancy.

 _I forgave him that,_ she thinks. Her next thoughts come with ironclad certainty. _I will_ **_make_ ** _him forgive me this._

 

* * *

 

 **l.**  
“I had such a nightmare,” Pietro whispers. “I woke Luna screaming.”

Wanda’s fingers comb through her brother’s hair - here in the light of day it is easy to see so many things. Pietro’s hands are warmer than Vision’s, his eyes brighter, his hair thicker but coarser.

Pietro is her brother, her _twin,_ while Vision is her husband.

And she loves them both so very dearly.

 

* * *

 

 **li.**  
Vision sleeps steadily. He’d fallen asleep with his head on her chest again, but had rolled away after a little while, his back pressing lightly against her arm. Wanda half-wonders if his subconscious already knows what she’s going to do. If he already shuns her.

Wanda rises from the bed, pulls on her robe.

She knows how to ensure no stairs creak as she ascends.

 

* * *

 

 **lii.**  
“I love you,” Pietro whispers into her mouth. His lips brush over hers, over her cheek, over her cheekbone and eyelids, over her brows, back to her hairline. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too,” Wanda whispers, fingernails grazing over her brother’s skin. “So very much.”

Pietro’s face is buried against her neck, his teeth nipping along behind the kisses he leaves as he whispers, “I wish I did not have to share you.”

Wanda swallows the lump in her throat, presses her face into her brother’s hair. “Do not kill him,” Wanda whispers.

The hum of assent rumbles in Pietro’s throat, almost a growl as his teeth and lips press to her shoulder. “Not yet,” he promises. “I shan’t kill him yet. So long as we are safe.”

The lump in Wanda’s throat is like lead. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “Not _ever.”_

Pietro’s eyes… bright and blue, wounded and sad, furiously angry, somehow understanding, so many things mingled in their depths. “To hurt him,” Wanda murmurs, pressing her face to Pietro’s collarbones, “would be like hurting Luna. A thing we must _never_ do.”

She feels as Pietro’s lips press to her hair. His voice is still rough as he says, “You are still so soft-hearted, beloved.”

 _Maybe,_ Wanda thinks. _That does not matter so long as you obey._

“Please,” she whispers, pressing a kiss to his throat, to his jaw, trails her nails over his side, digging in just enough to get his attention. _“Please.”_

Pietro’s hum is a rumbling thing and Wanda can feel the warmth of his exhale over her skin as he dips his head to kiss her.

And then they hear the softly spoken _“No,”_ from the doorway.

 

* * *

 

 **liii.**  
(Wanda sees the vicious joy-possessiveness that fills Pietro’s gaze.)

 _“No,”_ she whispers, rises, steps towards Vision, but he is already running, Pietro smiling viciously is set to follow and Wanda…

She is frozen.

 

* * *

 

 **liv.**  
Pietro feels _glorious._ All his possessive rage, all the long-had knowledge that Wanda is his and he is Wanda’s comes rising to the fore, bright and shining, a fire as fast-moving as the stubble-burnings he and Wanda had once raced across the fields.

He can feel Wanda, warm beside him, her hand in his even as she stepped forwards, feels the anchoring knowledge that she is _his_ and he is _hers_ and that they are not _safe._

 _I will protect us,_ he thinks. _In whatever way is necessary._

He can hear Vision moving, running for the lift in the core of the building, but it is slow and stiff and Pietro knows he can run faster than it, pull Vision from it but a floor lower. He almost wants to laugh as the exhilaration ripples through him - he and Wanda are not safe now, not at all but he can _make_ them safe, make them safe and remove this thing that has been separating them, bring them back together as they should be, as they are _meant_ to be.

_Only each other. Ever and always._

Pietro’s fingers are light on the banister as he leaps down the stairs chasing after - and ahead of - the lift.

He is there as the lift pauses, as Vision’s shocked and terrified face draws level with his own. “Don’t _run,”_ he says, almost disappointed, as he pulls the grilles open. Vision is gaping, gasping, eyes still so shocked-scared.

Pietro laughs as he pulls him from the lift by his pyjama shirt.

 

* * *

 

 **lv.  
** “You aren't siblings!” Vision says, gasped in shock, and Wanda can see how much his face has blanched.

Pietro’s hands twist in Vision’s shirt, pin him closer to the creaking railing of the balcony. “Oh,” Pietro says, an almost sensual snarl. “That’s _adorable._ We _are.”_

And Vision is flying through the air.

 

* * *

 

 **lvi.  
** It is her brother’s name she cries as Vision falls, not her husband’s. She’s not sure why, not now, when she knows she loves Vision at least as much as she does Pietro.

(Maybe it is because she hopes it will make Pietro _stop.)_

Vision crashes to the ground and only the pile of snow beneath the gaping hole of their roof breaks his fall. Pietro’s eyes, their bright pale blue, are fixed on hers, looking up with a fierce and desperate fervour. Vision - pale skin, pale shirt, dark dressing gown spread about him like the pinned wings of a moth - lies below.

“Pietro,” she whispers, heart in her throat. “If you have killed him I will not ever forgive you.”

 

* * *

 

 **lvii.  
** He meets her at the stairs, his hands catching her arms with gentle firmness. Years ago, years upon years gone, this once might have grounded her, calmed her.

Now, all she can think of is Vision splayed on the floor.

“We are _safe,”_ Pietro whispers to her. “We are safe, he cannot part us now.”

Wanda shakes free of her brother’s hands, looks to Vision below. _Is_ that his chest rising and falling with breath? Or is it her imagination as a breeze ruffles his shirt?

“If you have killed him,” Wanda says again. “I will not ever forgive you.”

Pietro takes a step back. “Wanda,” he says, “You cannot-”

“I told you,” Wanda says. “For you to hurt him would me like me hurting Luna. _A thing we must never do.”_

“You can’t-”

 _“You kept Luna!”_ Wanda says, and it is a scream. “Even when you failed to kill Crystal, even when you _let her leave,_ I did not ask you to do the thing you forbade me from! You kept your daughter. You have someone who is yours alone. Who do I have?”

“Me,” Pietro says, and he is whispering. “You always have _me.”_

“You are my _brother,”_ Wanda says. “You belong to Luna _too._ We have each bound ourselves outwards over and over to try to keep ourselves whole, piecing ourselves apart over and over!” Wanda breathes in deeply, reaches out to take her brother’s hands, feels his fingers close around hers almost desperately. “You love Luna. You would not let me harm her. Pietro, it is much the same for me with Vision.”

Pietro’s head bows, the fierceness in his eyes dims. Wanda lifts a hand to cup her brother’s face, run her thumb over his lips. “I love you, Pietro. But I love Vision too. _I forbid you from taking him from me.”_

 

* * *

 

 **lviii.  
** Vision comes to feeling the cold of the snow against his back. He aches all over, one calf is agony and he can hear, above him, the voices of the twins.

“You _cannot_ move him, Pietro. Not until he is awake.”

“He will freeze, then, Wanda, I thought you wanted him to _live.”_

For a moment there are soft hands pressing, warm and gentle, to his cheeks, and Wanda’s voice saying his name. (He can almost, but for the cold against his back, the agony of his leg, believe this is just the morning and he is waking from a nightmare.)

Then he opens his eyes and sees the gaping hole of the roof, sees the twins faces looking down at him.

“You-” he manages.

“He won’t hurt you.” Wanda’s voice is fierce and certain. “I won’t _let_ him.”

Something of his horror, of his shock, must be showing on his face, because Wanda’s hands stroke his cheeks again, her expression softens to something apologetic and almost pitying at once.

“Vision,” she says. “We need to know, before we move you - what hurts?”

He lets his head sink backwards, lets his eyes close. Huffs out a breath that makes his ribs complain. “Everything,” he says. “But mostly my leg.”

“Oh thank the _gods,”_ Wanda says - for it is Wanda’s voice and he cannot imagine Pietro being glad for him for anything. He cracks his eyes open, sees where Wanda is kneeling over him, one hand reaching towards his. “We need to move you upstairs,” she says and rises, stands back.

It takes Vision’s battered head a moment before he realises, a moment in which Pietro steps slowly forward, eyes still a-burning with something almost anger - he is going to have to trust Pietro not to drop him.

 

* * *

 

 **lix.** **  
** Pietro doesn’t drop him. Vision almost cannot believe it when he is carefully set onto the bed he shared with Wanda, after being carried up two flights of stairs and past the broken balcony from where he’d fallen-

No. Been _thrown._

Wanda stays at his side, pushing up the leg of his pyjamas, gently carefully feeling out the unnatural bend in it until Vision hisses with pain he cannot hold in. Wanda glances to him with wary, knowing eyes. “Do not hold it in,” she says, fingers gentle and cool on his leg still. “I need to know how bad it is so I can _fix_ this.”

Vision is young, Vision is naïve, Vision is _innocent_ of _so much_ of the world.

He’s heard all of these things before - from Father, from friends, from his _brother._ He’d never quite believed them until now, now when he was quite certain he no longer was. His laugh is bitter and painful as he slumps back into the pillows.

“How,” he says, “Do you plan to fix _this?”_

 

* * *

 

 **lx.**  
Wanda’s hands still on Vision’s leg. Slowly, carefully, she pushes herself away, rises. “Get a bowl of hot water,” she tells Pietro. “And one of snow and bring me clean cloths, and the surgeon’s box with Mother’s medicine.” She glances back to Vision’s leg, takes a breath. “And a splint.”

Pietro vanishes downstairs - she can hear his footsteps and how the stairs creak with his weight, so minutely different to how they creaked with Vision’s only the day before. She can’t hear Luna moving about, somehow some _miracle_ has allowed Luna to sleep through this and she hopes, she hopes, that Luna will not wake until morning, will give them that much time to decide what to say.

“Your brother,” Vision says, voice certain and almost accusatory, “tried to _kill me.”_

 

* * *

 

 **lxi.**  
Wanda’s eyes dart to his face, dark eyes made darker by pupils blown wide, by a face seeming almost leached of blood and colour. Her words, when she speaks, are soft and almost choked.

“I know.”

Vision doesn’t have the energy for this. He rarely had the energy to argue with his _father_ and if anyone could raise what ire Vision has it was his father. And now, now when he is aching all over, his leg in agony, when Pietro Maximoff, his _brother-in-law_ has just tried to _murder_ him.

Vision wants nothing more than to sleep and to find this to be nothing more than a dream. He wants to be able to sink into the bed and ignore the pain, forget what he had _seen_ (Wanda, wrapped in her brother’s arms, nothing sibling-like at all in what passed between them). He wants to be able to trust Wanda to fix his leg as she seems to want to, trust that Pietro won’t try to hurt him again, trust that _now_ after all these lies, they are being honest. He wants to write a letter home to his father saying _you were right, you were right, I knew nothing of them after all._

But he can’t. He is here. This is what is happening now. He can’t do as he once might have.

Instead, he makes himself ask, _“Why?”_

 

* * *

 

 **lxii.**  
He knows why. Wanda knows that Vision knows why, at least in part. He had _seen_ them. He _must_ know that Pietro has never liked him much and now he has _seen_ them. He knows. He must know.

Wanda closes her eyes. Wanda sits at the edge of the bed.

Wanda’s hand gently rests on the one part of Vision’s calf that isn’t agony to touch.

“It is a long story,” she says. “And you are in pain, and soon you will have laudanum dulling your mind. I will tell you when you wake, if you still wish to know it all.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxiii.**  
Her dark eyes are downcast, her fingers, still cold and soft, like the snow he’d landed on, are gentle on his leg. Vision pushes himself up onto his elbows, balances himself just long enough to reach out, try to touch Wanda’s cheek.

He slumps when she flinches.

“I want to know _now_ ,” he says. “Before your brother tries again.”

Wanda’s eyes are dark and intense, flashing up to his without any hesitation. Vision almost envies her certainty. “He will _not._ I forbade him and he _will not_ betray me again.” She sighs, something long and tired and Vision thinks she looks smaller than she ever has before. “He will not forgive himself if he does.”

Vision reaches out, stretches a hand, palm up, towards Wanda. Her hand still rests, cold and gentle and soft, on his leg.

“Please,” he says. _“Tell me.”_

 

* * *

 

 **lxiv.**  
Once, Wanda tells him, there had been children. Two children, twins - a brother and a sister - living in the vast hall with their parents. Their parents were quite well off, quite happy, and owned the land in the area for miles upon miles. The children could run all day in the fields around the hall, past sheep and cattle and wheat and barley and not reach lands they were not allowed to run on.

So it was until they were ten years old.

Beneath the hill the hall stood on, beneath many of the fields where the sheep and cattle grazed, lay clay. Thick and strong and scarlet as heartsblood, it could be used in a myriad ways. It made the ground soft when wet but strong when cold or dry, and for years the family had known better than to mine it and undermine the lands they called their own.

So it was until the year they turned ten, the year the cold struck harder and sooner than ever before. Crops failed, cattle died, sheep starved. They had no crops to sell, no farmers who would stay and pay rent.

They had nothing but the scarlet clay, as rich and ready as blood.

Their father chose to mine it, dig out the clay that smelled like blood as well as looked like it. It was the iron, he said, the iron that gave it that colour, and he dug out huge cartloads of it with workmen who would stay to mine but not to farm. They mined out the fields where once sheep and cattle had grazed. Then they mined the fields where once wheat and barley had grown.

The children’s mother counselled against it, reminded their father that the clay held up their home, that the clay was the earth’s so much more than it was theirs.

“We own this land,” the children’s father said. “The clay is ours to sell.”

They sold the clay. First in small amounts and then larger.

And then the man from America had come.

“I will pay,” he said, “good money if you sell this clay only to me.”

The children’s father haggled with the American, set the price such that they knew they were not being cheated. When he took the contract to the children’s mother to look over she turned her eyes away.

“The clay is not ours to sell,” she said. “To do so undermines everything we are, undermines our very home.” She had gathered the children to her, taken them inside and upstairs, locked the door to the attic where they played on frozen and rainy days with a key that only she had a copy of. “We will not partake of this.”

The men listened to the children’s mother - knew her to be some stripe of witch, she who paid for the doctors when they or their wives or their children needed them, she who made the charms to ward off bad luck and ghosts, the charms that _worked._

“We will not work,” they had said, “if she disapproves.”

Their father had gritted his teeth, and nodded. The American came, at the end of the year, to ask why there was no clay for him to buy.

“The men,” the children’s father said. “They are superstitious. They think they mine the heartsblood of these hills.”

“Well,” the American said. “I will buy these hills from you, and bring my own men in.”

And so he had. It was not like the children’s father had money left to stand on.

The farms were gone. The fields, the sheep, the cattle. The farmers left, and the fieldhands and the miners. The house stood and the children saw, all around them, land they could no longer run on, land a wide open and gaping sore in the countryside, red and bleeding like an open wound, as gory as an excised heart.

“You have killed us,” the children’s mother said, as she lay dying.

(She had been dying from the moment the mining had started, as though it was not just the heartsblood of the hills, the clay, but her heartsblood too.)

Their mother died, and was buried in the clay beneath the house. They were eleven when it happened, watching her fade away, surviving only on laudanum come the end. The American, just outside their home, mined more and more and more into the hill, dug out the iron-rich clay, the heartsblood of the hills.

When they turned twelve they were orphans.

When they were thirteen the American left, left the dug-out hills, a gaping dirt-filled sore like a scab, no longer full of the heartsblood of the hills.

The American’s name, Wanda said, was Anthony Stark.

 

* * *

 

 **lxv.**  
“I have the things,” Pietro says from the doorway. A steaming bowl of water is balanced on top of one which Vision assumes is full of snow, cloths over his arm and in his other hand is a splint and a medicine box.

Vision does not miss how something in Wanda’s face relaxes as she turns to look to her brother.

“The table,” she says. “I will prepare. I will call you if I need you.”

Pietro’s steps are almost silent as he places bowl and bowl and cloths and box and splint on the table. “You will need me,” he says, and he sounds so perfectly sure, so absolutely certain. His gaze as he watches his sister is… Vision wonders if he is only noticing it now because he knows, or if it is only now he knows that they are showing it so openly. “To reset a leg?” Pietro asks. “You will need my help.”

Wanda’s voice is certain. “I will call you,” she says. “Go and check on Luna.”

There is a sigh, so soft Vision barely hears it. Wanda seems to hear it clearly though, and swallows, her shoulders hunch very slightly even as her brother leaves, her eyes shut.

As Wanda begins to press warm cloths and cold against the mess of his broken leg Vision asks, “What happened then?”

 

* * *

 

 **lxvi.**  
The children grew. The servants of the house were loyal to the family that had sat there for generations and raised the children as their parents and their lawyers and the wills entailed. The money that remained was saved - for tutors, for food, to try to make the most of what little remained of the estate (the village, the house, the hill and no more) - and the children learned… poverty.

(“Not true poverty,” Wanda says. “We were never so poor as some of the villagers. But we lost so much. Often, it felt as though Pietro and I had only each other.”)

As the children grew to more, the money grew less. Servants were let go, wings of the house closed off.

“It was Stark,” the boy whispered to his sister.

“It was greed,” the girl whispered to her brother.

They decided together: they needed money. They needed their family’s lands whole again.

They needed _vengeance._

 

* * *

 

 **lxvii.**  
“That doesn’t explain anything,” Vision says, and hisses as Wanda presses down lightly on his leg. Hot water runs over his skin, washes away a little more of the blood. “If you wanted vengeance why marry _me?_ Why not just kill my father?”

“It explains,” she says, “More than you think.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxviii.**  
The children needed money, but they had only so many ways to get it. They culled their staff more, saved what they could. Relied on each other almost totally, learned how to do the jobs once the servants would have done.

By the time they were seventeen they were the only inhabitants of the house.

“We cannot trust anyone,” they said to each other - neither of them remembered who had said it first any longer - “Only each other.”

 _Only each other_ became their promise. Only each other to trust. Only each other to go to. Only each other to love and-

 

* * *

 

 **lxix.**  
“We knew that it was wrong,” Wanda says. She cannot seem to meet Vision’s eyes, but her fingers are terribly gentle as she packs snow around the swelling of his leg. “We _knew,_ but we had _no one else._ Only each other. We had always loved each other, always put one another first. With the servants going, with only us… we had no one to turn to but each other to try to understand ourselves, to trust, to love. We already cared for each other. With our parents gone, with no one else to talk to… we did not know how to _stop.”_

Wanda swallows, manages to, oh-so-briefly, meet Vision’s gaze. “We possess each other. We belong to each other. _Only_ each other. We… for the longest time we did not know how to be otherwise, even though our plans necessitated it.”

He can feel the lump in his throat - worry, fear, dread - like lead. “What plans?”

 

* * *

 

 **lxx.**  
They needed money. They could not win it or inherit it, had too few ways to earn it and so but one way was left to them - marriage.

They could marry people, people with money, and eke from them the money they might have had if fate had been otherwise. They would regain the money their family had lost, regain their status and, eventually, turn their eyes to Stark, for their final vengeance.

But first they had to get there. First they needed money.

 

* * *

 

 **lxxi.**  
“We took it in turns,” Wanda says. “I was better with people, so I married the first time. His name was Strucker. He was a Baron.” She wrings out a cloth, dampens it again. “Pietro pushed him, on the roof, after I argued with him - Strucker, that is. He fell through the roof.” Wanda shudders. “It was horrible,” she says, “But I am glad he is dead. He was a brute. People were just… things, to him, and he did not even feel guilt for it.”

Vision is reasonably certain his mouth is half-agape.

“Pietro married next. He hated it. Hated her. Hated the whole farce even more than he had Strucker.” Wanda sighs. “He has always hated anything that comes between us, that keeps us apart. _Only each other_ is our promise, and he hates to break it. He would come to my room in the night, hating himself - for betraying me, for us having to be apart, for risking the farce. He would hide in my arms until the early hours of the morning, and then pretend he had never left their bed.”

There is something dead and almost sad in Wanda’s voice as she says, “In the end we poisoned her. She asphyxiated.”

Vision is _very_ certain his mouth is agape.

“Then was Zemo. Pietro killed his wife, his son. Made it look like an accident. We poisoned him too. Buried him with the rest, in the vats beneath the house.” Wanda laughs, a bizarre, bitter thing. “Pietro used to say we were giving back the hills their heartsblood with each person we killed. Giving them back their life and magic. I think he used to think we would bring back Mother if we killed enough people.” She shakes her head, dark hair flying, dark eyes shining with near-tears. “But magic doesn’t work like that.”

She swallows, continues. “Then it was Crystal.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxxii.**  
Crystal was almost royalty, in effect, her family some old, obscure branch of aristocracy with fingers in so many pies it was beyond counting. She was beautiful too, and quietly persistent, and the sister could see her brother growing more and more confused by his new bride each day.

She did not see when their promise was broken, however, and nor was she told until, one breakfast, Crystal had announced her pregnancy.

That night the brother had gone to his sister’s room. Buried his face against her legs, fingers catching in her nightgown, uttering, over and over, _“I am sorry, I am sorry, I did not mean to break the promise.”_

The sister’s hands had stroked over her brother’s hair. Tugged his head back, so their eyes met.

“We must kill her,” she had said. “And you must never betray me again.”

The sister had not missed the fear in her brother’s eyes. The begging moment of _please, no, not this._

“Please,” the brother said. “Do not make me. Not yet.”

They belonged to each other. _Only each other._ That another had some claim… but the sister would not make her brother do that which he so dreaded, not if they were yet safe. “Not yet,” the sister said. “But if we are at risk. If we are not safe-”

“I will make us safe,” the brother said. “By any means necessary.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxxiii.**  
“But he did not,” Wanda says. “Luna was born. Crystal… learned something. Something that made her make plans to leave. We were poisoning her then, waiting. Maybe she had learned of that. But she left. Pietro did not follow. Pietro did not try to make us safe. The only thing keeping us safe was Luna.”

Vision is quite aware that he is staring.

“We waited,” Wanda says. “After Luna. I think Pietro thinks I did not trust him, after that, but it was more than that. We had _Luna._ She was so small, as a baby. So small and yet so strong. That the house was rotting did not daunt her. That the fields looked bloody did not scare her. That the nanny we found for her was wary of this, of _us…_ she did not seem to mind. She grew, in this rotting place, and grew as strong as a sapling. We had been dying, here, wasting away like a limb starved of blood, of their heartsblood. Somehow, Luna tapped into the heartsblood of the _house_ not the lands.”

“Magic isn’t real,” Vision manages to say, though his mouth is dry. “You can’t expect-”

“Maybe not,” Wanda says. “But when she was five she found the vats far below. Not the bodies in them, we had moved them by then, burned them. But the vats of clay.” Vision feels like he is nothing more than a pinned moth before Wanda’s gaze. “It made us think. We had come so far. Come so _close._ We had one thing left to sell.”

“One vengeance left to take,” Pietro says from the doorway. He is leaning there, casually, blue eyes still so bright they seem to be burning. Wanda’s hand finds Vision’s where it rests still, palm up.

“He will not hurt you,” Wanda says, but she is watching her brother, as though to say, _He won’t hurt_ **_us._ **

 

* * *

 

 **lxxiv.**  
She is watching Pietro as though to say _If you hurt him, I will not ever forgive you._ Pietro pushes off from the wall, takes a single step into the room.

“Are you ready?” he asks. “The leg must be set.”

He will admit to himself that there may be some slight pleasure in the idea at being able to hurt Vision even under his sister’s watchful eye.

“The laudanum,” Wanda says, standing, reaching towards the table.

Pietro clenches his jaw. He had almost hoped she had forgotten.

“After all this, Pietro?” Wanda says, and Pietro does not know how she noticed, looking away from him as she was, but then they have always known each other so well. “You have already hurt him. Already tried to kill him. I did not insist you chase down Crystal when she was gone, I did not chase her down myself. I did not ask for Luna to go.”

“You care about Luna too. I do not care about him.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxxv.**  
The bottle of laudanum is cool in Wanda’s hand and it is but two strides to take her to her brother. Her hand rests lightly on his wrist.

“But you can,” she says. “Just as I did Luna.”

Pietro’s arms are still crossed, his gaze still burning, but Wanda… Wanda lifts her chin, does not blink.

Slowly, almost apologetically, Pietro’s eyes close, his face relaxes. Something of his burning fierceness eases. Wanda’s hand cups her brother’s cheek. “I forgave you,” she whispers. “I let you keep Luna. I love Luna too. It is-”

“Only fair,” Pietro says, turning his face into her hand, pressing a kiss to the heel of it. For once he is being surprisingly gentle, gentle in that way they so rarely are, that way that almost always serves some other purpose. “We have not been only each other’s since we started this, I suppose.”

“Sometimes,” Wanda says, softly, “I fear we never were.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxxvi.**  
Vision sleeps once they have set his leg. Wanda knows how much laudanum he was given, knows that he will sleep deeply and well for many hours yet.

“He will heal,” Wanda says, when they are done, and then reaches to take Pietro’s hand. “Sit with me?”

Pietro takes her hand, follows her downstairs. Wanda thinks that, now, with this new shift in their world, in how they _are,_ he does not know how to do otherwise.

 

* * *

 

 **lxxvii.**  
Vision is woken by a shadow.

Well, no. It is not a shadow. It is… Vision fears it might be a ghost.

 

* * *

 

 **lxxviii.**  
“Why do you want him to live?” Pietro asks, Wanda tucked under his chin, his arms gentle around her shoulders where they’re sat on the sopha. “I don’t _understand.”_

He doesn’t, Wanda knows that. She can hear it in his voice, questioning and querying and nothing at all of his previous denial and outright anger. He doesn’t understand, but he’d like to _try._

“I love him,” Wanda says. “As I do you.”

She doesn’t have to tilt her head, look up at her brother’s face to know he is frowning. “Why?” he asks. “How?”

Wanda shrugs. “It’s hard to explain. I just do. It would be like asking me why I love you, or why you love me.”

“But I know why I love you,” Pietro says, and his words sound so very simple, almost like Luna’s. “You are my sister. You were all the family I had left. The only friend I had. Of _course_ I love you.”

Wanda smiles, takes her brother’s hand gently, lets their palms and fingertips press softly together. “That is the simple side of it, I suppose. From that angle I would say that I love Vision because he is gentle, because he is kind. Because he means well and has no ill-feeling to him. He is genuine in his kindness, not like Strucker’s goals to gain something, nor Zemo’s desire for affection and a place to make his own home after his loss. Vision simply… cares because it is his nature. And I love him for that.”

Pietro’s fingers are gentle on her shoulder, rubbing small circles as he thinks. “Like you,” he murmurs, voice soft. “He cares like you do.”

“Mm.” It’s a hum of noise, Wanda gives, and she curls into her brother, lets his fingers, still rubbing gentle circles on her shoulder, soothe her. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxxix.**  
Vision’s hand reaches for the charm that should be in his pocket, that he’d _put_ in his pocket when he’d gone to bed but it isn’t there. He supposes it must have fallen out as he’d fallen, that small thing that kept the ghosts from him.

 _That Wanda had made for me_ , he remembers. He wonders, for just a moment, _Did she make it because the ghosts would tell me something?_

He pushes himself up, past the pain of his leg, props himself up on his elbows and the pillows behind him. “Is anyone there?”

He doesn’t expect a response.

He _certainly_ doesn’t expect the shadow to step forward with a face almost like his brother’s.

 

* * *

 

 **lxxx.**  
“It has been,” the ghost says - or maybe it’s the wind, Vision truly deeply hopes it is only the wind - “So long since last I have seen you.”

Ultron, Vision knows, is _dead._ He saw him die, saw him _killed,_ had given the police the very information that led to that outcome.

“You had…” the ghost waves a skeletal hand, black as a shadow, red-palmed, and briefly, for just a moment, the whites of Ultron’s eyes seem to show. “Something, on you, keeping me from coming close. And well… the first time I only saw you because you were so close to death.”

“You’re _dead,”_ Vision manages, words choked out. “You _died.”_

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxi.**  
The laughter of a ghost, Vision learns, is the howling of the wind, the rattle of hailstones against glass, the creaking and groaning of the house around them as it warps around the spirit it does not wish to be there. Vision wishes he still had the charm Wanda gave him even as he worries as to its purpose, new-seeded in his mind.

“Yes,” Ultron says eventually. “Yes I did. But that is not why I am here.”

Vision’s eyebrows rise, for he cannot think why Ultron might be here if _not_ because of his death.

The ghost of his brother waves a casual hand. “I cannot haunt or hurt those who killed me. They are not _blood,”_ he says and he almost seems to spit the word, the _clink_ of hail against glass sounding like a warning. “But I can hurt those who would hurt our family. Hurt Father, hurt Mother.” Ultron pauses from glancing around the room, the tar-black and blood-red and bedsheet-white undulations of colour over him pausing as he looks instead to Vision. “Hurt you.”

If Ultron were living and not some eerie all-seeing ghost Vision thinks his bitter laugh might have surprised him. But Ultron seems to _know_ already, know that he has been hurt, and Vision wonders if his brother was among the number of the ghosts he thought he had seen. Ultron seems aware.

“They have already hurt me,” Vision says. “And now they are trying to heal me. I do not think this matter is so simple as you see it.”

Ultron’s smile is a vicious thing, wild and dangerous and almost snarling as Wanda’s brother’s had been when he had pushed him over the balcony. “Perhaps,” Ultron concedes, “but that does not mean they may not try to hurt you _again.”_

His doubt must be obvious, Vision thinks. Pietro, perhaps, he thinks could do him harm, but he trusts Wanda, trusts in what she has said, that Pietro will not break a promise to her, will not do her harm by hurting him. He cannot imagine them doing him harm when they have tried to heal the harm they did.

“Accept it, brother,” Ultron says, arms spreading like shadowed wings, more a bat’s than the moths of the house, the moths Vision has learned to love. “You do not belong here. There is no space here for any but _them.”_ The wind whispers around them, whispers thoughts and Vision remembers what he had seen, the twins pressed so close in embrace, pulling each other closer, nails digging in, lips pressed to lips, nothing sibling-like at all in any of it. “They’ve made space for themselves, and they would never let another join them. They lured you in like a fly into a web, trapped you in the threads of it but never let you be part of them. Instead…” Ultron gestures, some grandly gentle sweeping thing, his hand stretching as though encompass the whole house, to show how he is up here while Luna sleeps and the twins are downstairs. “Instead, you remain apart.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxii.** **  
** When Ultron leaves - so readily after that last devastating statement - Vision cannot sleep. He knows the things he has seen, over these past few hours alone.

Pietro watches his sister as though she is a buoy in storming waters, a lighthouse guiding him to safe harbour. Wanda watches her brother as though he is the doors of the house, the final step home. They watch each other as though they are each the final gateway, the final threshold to each other’s safety.

They watch each other, Vision realises, as though they are each other’s exposed and beating hearts.

Is there a place for him in this? Can there ever be? Even if Wanda’s love for him is true it is clear now, so clear, that her love for her brother, her brother’s love for her is an all-encompassing, inescapable thing. How can he have a place when there is no space, has never been space for any but the two of them, interlinked like parasitic figs?

There has never been space for another.

He feels almost as though he is falling, with this realisation. Even Wanda’s well-wishing, her clear hope for his wellbeing, her care, what love she offers-

What meaning has it?

He might as well be falling again, pushed away by her brother and reaching for her where she waits so far away, only watching, watching him fall.

But - he remembers. She had said something as he had been falling, screamed it as though it would keep all their souls from being stolen.

She had screamed her brother’s name.

Is Ultron right in this all? It seems as though he might be, could be. It is so easy now to see the manipulation that had drawn him close, Wanda coddling him in her web like a spider with a fly.

So. Ultron is right, about that at least.

But Ultron is a ghost, and ghosts have their own agendas, their own plots and plans.

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxiii.  
** It is almost morning before Ultron visits again. He is a looming midnight shadow in one dark, dim corner, the darkness shrouding him so the shimmers of white and the curls of blood red seem to shine like tar or black oil. Like something toxic.

But. Vision knows this: the twins had not seemed toxic and yet were. Ultron, who seems toxic, may well not be.

“Why are you here?” Vision asks, his voice a whisper. “What do you need of me?”

Ultron’s ghost seems to sigh, an exhale like a soft gust of wind up the chimney, causing the embers in the fireplace to spark. “What I need,” he says, “Is for you to wake the house.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxiv.**  
Vision does not know magic. Vision barely believes in _ghosts_ even with his brother’s stood before him, but he remembers what Wanda had said, how the ghosts had vanished from the corner of his sight after she had given him the charm, how now, with the charm gone, his dead brother stands before him again.

“And how,” asks Vision, “do you intend for me to do _that,_ brother?”

The tar-dark face, the bloodied eyes so dim in the shadowed corner make only more stark the bone-pale smile that slices across Ultron’s face.

“Ah,” he says. “I shall tell you.”

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxv.**  
Vision’s leg is agony as he creeps downstairs, down one cold corridor and away from the main part of the house. It’s been splinted now, and Wanda was kind enough to ask Pietro to find a suitable cane for him, so there was at least that, left close by the bed. It still hurts though, every step on his broken leg, the flesh horribly bruised. His ribs ache too, with each breath, but there is only so much he can do.

He does not want to hurt the twins, really, but Ultron…

His brother has good points, sound reasoning. Wanda manipulated him, Pietro tried to kill him, all because of their loss. There are ghosts here, the ghosts of those they killed, and Wanda herself has said that the house is dying, dying without the clay that was stolen from the hills. Waking the house, Vision half-thinks, might do them good, might prevent further deaths, might free the ghosts. Might free them from their vengeful drive.

Vision finds a seeping gap, the thick stream of crimson clay that drips over old and peeling plaster and down onto dark grey flagstones.

 _“You must cut your hand,”_ his brother’s ghost had said. _“And press it to the clay so your blood mingles with the blood of the hills. That will wake the house and free it. Then, then I can do my work. Then I can save this place.”_

Vision pulls the knife - stolen from the kitchen - from his pocket and presses it to the palm of his hand. He could look to his leg - he knows there is blood there, but that is dried and mayhaps he is weak but he does not wish to court further pain from that break. Blood seeps out, as rich a red as the crimson before him and he reaches to press it to the clay.

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxvi.**  
Pietro slept restlessly to know that Vision rested alone upstairs. Wanda in his arms usually eased his worry and his restlessness both, but now, with a victim living, with them still _at risk_ he cannot. He slips out from where Wanda leans against him on the sopha, gently settling her to where his body heat still warms it, tucking a blanket over her.

He will not hurt Vision - that he has promised his sister and he will not break that, not unless they are truly, visibly at risk from him - but he will watch the one who might yet do them harm.

He knows how to walk in silence in this house, just as Wanda does, just as they have taught Luna to. The loose parquet pieces do not creak or slip beneath his feet, he does not scuff loose leaves away. He is almost at the stairs when he sees the charm that Wanda had made her husband, a rats rib, a sprig of rowan, tied with clay-stained string.

The charm that keeps the ghosts away.

Pietro spins on his heel, the charm in his hands. Did it fall when Vision did? Before then? After? Have the ghosts spoken to him, turned him yet more against them? _Are they at risk?_

Pietro’s eyes are darting, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghosts he knows he cannot see with the charm in his hands when he hears the softest of footsteps down a nearby corridor.

Pietro’s hand closes around the charm, crushes the rat’s rib and the dried twig. His mind sings out one single word, the snake in his breast echoes it with a hiss.

_Risk._

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxvii.**  
Wanda’s eyes open to a dark room and her brother not at her side. She fell asleep against him and while he often wakes before her he usually would wake her too, let her know he was gone. That he has not done so, that Vision is _upstairs_ and _away_ …

Wanda does not think her brother will betray her, but the fear is there, creeping through her belly, worrying flutters like the wings of trapped moths.

The blanket and the sopha are still warm - not her body heat but her brother’s where he had leaned against the back of the sopha, against the arm. He is only recently gone and with how cold the room is… no more than a minute.

 _Please,_ Wanda hopes, _may that be enough to find him first._

Wanda’s feet step silently out of the room, into the hall. Her hand is on the banister, turning to go up the stairs when she sees it - Pietro’s footprints in the pile of snow, turning and turning before wet footsteps mark their way across the floor.

 _No,_ Wanda thinks, and follows.

She knows this corridor - old and dark, long since closed off from the rest of the house - remembers playing down it with Pietro in happier and brighter days. Remembers Pietro stood where is stood now, smiling in the sunlight as he now snarls in the moonlight.

Hidden in the depths of his shadow a knife glints, Vision falls.

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxviii.**  
“If I must die at anyone’s hands,” Pietro had said once, delirious with fever, “May they be yours.”

Wanda remembers mopping his brow, giving him teas of herbs to keep him from death, never even considering Mother’s box until he spoke.

“I could not kill you,” she had said, palm pressed to his fever-warm cheek. “It would be like killing myself.”

That had been then. Years past, when all they’d had was each other. This… this was now. With Luna in their care, Crystal in their history, _Vision_ in her heart.

Wanda thinks, very nearly, that she might be able to kill her brother, for all her love of him, if it will keep Vision safe.

Wanda thinks, very nearly, that this will break her heart in two.

 

* * *

 

 **lxxxix.**  
“How could you do that! You said you would not! You _promised_ me.” Wanda’s voice quietens, and Pietro can see the tears beading in her eyes, almost glimmering, unshed. “I _forbade you_ and you _promised.”_

Pietro reaches for her cheek, tries to cup it, show her that he did not do it in malice but she slaps his hand away. He lets his hand drop, doesn’t try to lift it. “I did not-”

“But you _did,”_ Wanda says.

“I had reason,” Pietro says, his fingers twitching at his side. He wants, desperately, to reach for Wanda but knows too that doing so… she might slap him away again and he does not know what to _do_ with that, being rejected by the one person who never has, who has accepted every part of him, good and bad and ugly and bloodied.

Wanda had embraced him even when he was covered in blood and clay and now, clean of any, she pushes him away.

Her eyes are wide. The tears are still there, unshed, and Pietro wants, oh he _wants_ to reach out to her.

Then, from the bed, Vision makes a noise.

Wanda turns immediately. Pietro’s hand, half-risen, falls.

“I had reason,” he promises. “You only have to ask.”

For a moment, just a moment, the longest moment of Pietro’s life, Wanda doesn’t look at him. She stays, stock still, looking to where Vision’s eyes have just cracked open, bleary against the bleak winter sunlight from the windows. “Tell me,” she says, shoulders dropping, “but not now. I am too angry now.”

Pietro’s mouth is dry as he swallows.

“Leave,” she says. “I will talk to you when I am done here.”

 

* * *

 

 **xc.**  
Vision can see the most minute shakes that Wanda has. She is trembling, trembling like a leaf, like a dark moth in the wind as her brother leaves and shuts the door with a quiet _snick_ behind himself.

She seems so small, now. The house curls around her, the dark roof like a hulking hound protecting its pup, the few moths fluttering around like wind ruffling through a hounds fur. The house almost feels _alive_ and Vision thinks that whatever he managed aided his brother more than he had thought. Her steps forward are silent - none of the floorboards creak under her feet, even those that always creaked under his no matter how gentle and careful his steps.

It reminds Vision: she is supposed to be here, in this house, this hall, her home. He never was.

She settles at the edge of the bed beside him, and he can feel the slight pressure where the coverlet is pulled taut, feel the ghost of her warmth through the thick wool. He can see the dark bags beneath her eyes, now, which worry and tiredness must have put there and he’d almost advise she sleep for all he knows that she likely will not.

She still has to go to talk to her brother, after all, even as Pietro has tried again to do him some kind of harm. He cannot seem to understand them, these twins, so interlinked even as Wanda goes against her brother, as Pietro goes against her. They push and pull at each other as inexorably as the tides, as eternal and unforgiving and where Wanda can be cool shallows of water, her brother is a riptide, a stormwave, something dangerous and unpredictable, something that will drag them all down into the depths.

“I am so sorry,” Wanda says, her hand reaching forward as though to stroke back his hair. “So sorry. He should not-”

Her hand touches his hair and Vision _cannot-_

“Do not,” Vision snaps, and Wanda’s hand recoils. “I am not… some _debt_ to be repaid. Do not do this because you think you _owe_ me.”

Wanda’s face, as she rises, is like stone. “ _Owe_ you? What on earth do you think I _owe you?”_

 _It is not a matter of debt,_ Vision wants to say, _but a matter of what you_ **_think_ ** _is owed. A matter of what is thought but is not real._

_The matter of your brother._

But he cannot say that. There are too many presumptions in that and Wanda is already-

Vision breathes in. Vision breathes out. “Do not be kind,” Vision says instead, his eyes on the coverlet, “if it is only because your brother is cruel. You do not have to be his mirror. You do not have to be what he is not. Do not be kind just because you think you must.”

Wanda’s hand is cold against his cheek, still trembling.

“I am kind,” she says, and her voice is half choked and Vision half-wishes he was still innocent of this all, unaware so that he was not so cruel, was not able to hurt Wanda so. “I am kind because _I love you._ Because you are injured _again_. I am kind because my brother has again tried to hurt you and I regret that and would undo it if I could.”

“Because you feel you owe me that,” he says, meeting her eyes. “You are kind because he has not been.”

“That does not negate the rest,” she says. “I love you. I worry about you. I care about you. Those are all reasons why I am kind, before that.” Her thumb is gentle as it brushes over his cheek, though still cold, still trembling. “Yes, I am kind because my brother is not, because I think you deserve kindness. But that does not make it a _debt._ It is kindness freely given.”

Vision lets his head bow into her touch, a movement he has seen her brother do a hundred or a thousand times before. He thinks he understands why now, why Pietro cedes so readily to his sister.

“I am sorry,” he says, and his lips brush against the heel of her hand, almost like a kiss. “I fear I have done something terrible.”

 

* * *

 

 **xci.** **  
** Wanda’s eyes are bright and dark, even the moonlight from the window not enough against the shadows on her face. “Tell me,” she says, voice low. “Tell me what you did.”

The breath Vision huffs is almost a laugh, but for the pain in his ribs. “So you can fix it?”

“I don’t know if I can fix it,” Wanda says, looking terribly old and tired. “I don’t know what you have done. But if Pietro attacked you because of _that_ then-”

“I-” Vision starts, swallows around the lump in his throat that threatens to choke him. His words become a whisper. “I woke the house.”

 

* * *

 

 **xcii.**  
Wanda’s eyes close, her lips part slightly as he lets out the smallest sigh, her head bowing just a touch. “Oh, Vision,” she murmurs. “Do you know what you have done?”

Her hands are white-knuckled and shaking now, where they hold the coverlet tight and Vision does not know what to do with the expression on her face.

“The house wakes, _the ghosts are freed,”_ Wanda says. “Do you know how many my brother has killed? How many will hunt him with the heartsblood of the house to strengthen them? How many may turn on me for my part in it, if they are strong enough to see and know and act?”

“The charm-” Vision starts.

“Protects one at a time and I do not have what I need to make more. If you still have yours-” Vision shakes his head, and Wanda’s face falls further. “They may hurt any of us,” Wanda says. “Even Luna.”

Her hand is cold in his, still trembling and yet somehow reassuring. “I must tell my brother,” she says, such ironclad certainty in her tone that Vision feels again put apart. “Thank you,” Wanda whispers, even as she reaches the door. “For telling me.”

 

* * *

 

 **xciii.**  
“The ghosts,” Wanda says, “Vision woke the house and the _ghosts_ alike.”

“How?” Pietro asks, “How did he know to do that?”

“One of the ghosts told him? I don’t know, I don’t _know!”_

Their discussion is hissed and quiet in Pietro’s room, near enough they can check on Luna, see if Vision tries to leave the bedroom, but far enough for them to have this debate.

“Make it sleep again,” Pietro says. “There must be some way, it slept for so long-”

“Since Mother died.” Wanda does not say the corollary. Someone may have to die this time to make the house rest again. “We shall have to keep watch,” she says. “Move Vision up here - none of the others died up here and they stay in the hall and the corridors and the rooms they lived and died in. None of them came up here.”

“Strucker fell from above here,” Pietro says and Wanda’s hands grasp his tightly.

“But not from _here._ They do not know this space. We can make it safe up here, just for a little while.”

“Wanda,” Pietro asks, his lips pressing a kiss to her brow. “Are you certain?”

“No,” she admits. “But I do not know what else to do.”

 

* * *

 

 **xciv.**  
The ghosts do not seem to emerge as they move Vision upstairs, balance him between them his cane held in Wanda’s hand. “My room,” Wanda says. “That is safest.”

Wanda’s room is dimly lit but somehow warm, though the hearthplace is empty. Red carpets layer the floor, and red blankets and cushions on her bed make it look warm as blood.

“Go and get Mother’s box,” Wanda says to Pietro as they help Vision settle on the edge of the bed. “We may need the laudanum.” Pietro is already moving to go, letting go of Vision’s arm as soon as he did not need to help him any more, but Wanda’s words still reach him even as he nears the door. “Pietro? Stay safe.”

Vision, perched as he is, his broken leg stretched out awkwardly before him, tucks his hands into his lap. “He hates me still, I fear.”

“Not… hate,” Wanda says, a small wry smile twisting her lips. “But he is protective. You are a risk. He does not like it if we are not safe. He will not hurt you, now, not unless you are a threat to us.”

“I _created_ a threat to you,” Vision says. “My brother-”

“Ultron,” Wanda says, voice soft. “I wondered which ghost had told you. I did not think you had brought your own.”

“I told the police where to find him,” Vision admits. “And he has always been persuasive. I did not think-”

Wanda’s hands take his gently. “You did not know ghosts. It is not your fault.”

For a moment there is silence, for a moment there is something almost like peace.

“Wanda!” Pietro calls from the stairs, loud and clear and Wanda’s slight wince tells Vision that she fears the shout has woken Luna. “Wanda, the _ghosts!”_

Wanda rushes to the railing and it is all Vision can do to find his cane and follow.

 

* * *

 

 **xcv.**  
Pietro bolts up the stairs the fingers of the ghosts close behind him. The box he pushes to Wanda, tries to get as many doors and walls between the ghosts and them, but it is not working. He races through the attic, sees Luna standing at her bedroom door, sees Vision, leaning on the cane, at the doorway to Wanda’s, sees Wanda at his, Mother’s box held in her arms.

The ghosts are close behind still, and Pietro can’t easily stop, only run circuits around the attic until there is distance enough as they push through doors and walls like there is nothing there.

He hurtles to a halt before Wanda, Luna now at her side, hand clutching Wanda’s nightgown. Vision is in the hall too, leaning on his cane, but Pietro doesn’t care about him.

This is a family matter.

“Wanda,” he asks, breathes, his pulse pounding in his ears. _“Please._ Trust me.”

Wanda’s eyes are wide and terrified and he can almost feel the cold of the ghosts as they draw nearer, almost feel their fingertips at his back. “Wanda,” he asks again. _“Please.”_

Wanda’s nod feels like a blessing, her kiss like absolution and he presses his mouth so hard to hers he tastes blood.

“I will always,” he promises, rocking back on his heel, “Protect you.”

 

* * *

 

 **xcvi.**  
There is blood on Pietro’s cheek or maybe it is clay, Vision isn’t sure. He is running, running through the house, the ghosts following him and he is laughing, laughing as though he is not inches from death each time the ghosts stretch out their fingers.

He careens towards the stairs, still laughing, sprints past Vision and for a moment Vision can see the scarlet caught on his teeth (blood), the lump of it on his cheek (clay).

The ghosts follow him like greyhounds after a rabbit.

Vision glances to the side, he can see Wanda at the railing, watching down from the top of the house, standing by the stairs, watching down after her brother - her beating heart - and her face… her face is as it was when he fell, aghast and shocked and terrified and Vision does not know what to do. Downstairs, Pietro sprints across the parquet.

 

* * *

 

 **xcvii.**  
_I will protect us,_ Pietro thinks, _by any means necessary._

 _Only each other_ had been the promise, but it had never been for just each other, it had been for vengeance for their parents and for them, it had been power because the estate needed it, life because the hills needed it, needed their heartsblood back.

Wanda had said once, when he had thought that the deaths would give the hills back their life, might give them back Mother. _Pietro. That is not how magic works._

No. No it isn’t. _This_ is how magic works, wild and careening, loud in his ears like his heartbeat, or maybe it _is_ his heartbeat. The magic of the hills is this: home. The magic of the hills is this: blood. The magic of the hills is this: protection.

The house has always been home. They have given it so much blood.

Now they must give the house its protector.

 

* * *

 

 **xcviii.**  
Wanda can feel the hills, feel them as Mother did, feels the scab outside, the beating heart within, or maybe it is _her_ heartbeat, loud and desperate in her ears. Wanda feel the house beneath her feet, the creaking timbers, the howling of the wind, the snow on the roof, can feel how it sings its sorrow and its loss into the winter.

 _I will protect us,_ Pietro had said. _I will protect us by any means necessary._

He has killed for her. Killed for them. Killed for so many reasons. He has hurt and been hurt and hurt her.

He is the one the ghosts will hold to blame. She is the one the ghosts will see as innocent.

(Floating over the vast hall she can see them. The ghosts of their parents.)

 _“Please,”_ she whispers to them. _“Stop him.”_

 

* * *

 

 **xcix.**  
The house has lived always, since before they were born, since before Mother and Father, since before the house was even there. The _hills_ have lived, full of their heartsblood, their blood and iron and clay, the stuff that life is made of.

They have given life to so much.

 _Protect Luna,_ he asks the house, but he knows that Wanda will do that, care for his daughter as though she was her own. _Protect Wanda,_ he asks the house, and he knows that it will do that, reawoken as it has now been. _Protect Vision,_ he thinks, even as he hates it. _Protect him from his brother._

The air is cold now, down in these abandoned wings, but is these abandoned wings that hide the basement and the vats, the place where life was poured back into the clay, back into the heartsblood of the hills. Ahead of him the wind that howls through the house blows open the doors.

 _You would try to use the house against us?_ Pietro thinks. _It is ours. It has always been ours._ He can see Ultron behind him from the corner of his eyes, the ghosts gaining on him, the crimson dead, and Ultron the blood of the vengeful, the black of emotion, the bright white of he-who-would-pass-on.

Ultron who would turn their home on them.

He knows vengefulness. He always has, he has been vengeful for so long it is a second skin to him, the burning fire that drives him as it drives Wanda. But Wanda loves, Wanda loves readily and freely, and he loves so closely, not at all so freely.

This is why he is the protector.

 

* * *

 

 **c.**  
“What is he doing?” Vision yells, because the wind is building, the storm outside climbing and he can see, see through the roof the vast dark clouds that are piling higher and higher almost as dark as soot even as the lightning crackles through.

Wanda’s face is pale, even her lips, her hands so cold in his.

“Magic,” she whispers. “He is working magic.”

 

* * *

 

 **ci.**  
The basement is cool and dark, red as the scarlet clay, red as exposed meat and organs, as the skinned carcasses from the abattoir, as the ghosts of those he killed. The vats are closed still, each lid still locked but he has the key (he has always had the key. He would not make his sister, so soft-hearted, do this).

The ghosts still chase him, fingers of mortality reaching and reaching, and he tries so hard to evade each chilling finger, slipping on the scarlet, and in this darkness, the scent of blood and iron-rich clay so strong in his nose that it _could_ be blood beneath his feet, the blood of the dead and damned and those he killed.

Killed for Wanda. Killed for them. Killed for the house.

The vats, so full of clay seem almost to bubble in the dark, rich and red, the heartsblood of the hills. They are still full and wet, even after so long in the cold, feel as warm as blood and organs, as flesh itself.

Pietro climbs onto the edge of one, grips the rotten beam above him as Ultron steps close, watches from the other side of the vat.

The ghosts reach. Ultron smiles. Pietro falls.

 

* * *

 

 **cii.**  
The clay is in his lungs, wrapping around his skin like Wanda’s hands, as warm as her kisses. It presses through his hair like her fingertips but all gentleness, none of the graze of nails, the warning that has been there so long.

 _I will keep us safe,_ he thinks. _I will protect us, by any means necessary._

He has killed others. He has let them go. He has kept his daughter, let Wanda keep her Vision.

He has protected, for so long. For so very long.

The clay wraps around him, as gentle as he and Wanda had once been, and he drowns.

 

* * *

 

 **ciii.**  
Wanda shakes, Wanda quakes, and around them the howling winds sing, the thunder like drums and it is almost like a keening, the noise the wind makes. The winds echo through the house, through the halls and up the chimneys, almost like the gasping, sobbing breaths of visitors at a funeral. The house itself, grieving. Vision tries to hold her, tries to keep her back from the edge, but Wanda is standing at the brink, by the broken balcony, watching where the ghosts had followed her brother, watching as though-

As though her heart is gone.

The wind is singing louder, howling something that is half warcry and half dirge. It brushes through Wanda’s hair, pushes it back like a stormwind, as though she stands on a grand cliff, some far precipice, as though any second she will fall.

“Don’t,” Vision asks. “Please.”

The wind builds, the stormclouds climb, and Luna is at Wanda’s side, her hand lost in her aunt’s robe. Somewhere, somewhere beyond, something is screaming, not the howling wind, not Wanda nor Luna nor Vision. It rises, unearthly, and Wanda’s gaze lifts, meets two ghosts waiting high above them all.

 _“Stop him,”_ Wanda whispers into the wind and they shake their heads.

“Wanda,” Vision says, arms wrapped around her, his cheek pressed to hers, his lips against her cheek.

Wanda chokes, Wanda cries, Wanda screams.

Wanda does not fall.

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

 **civ.**  
For a long time Wanda does not speak. She brings him tea and food, brings books to Luna where she sits in the chair by the fireplace in their room. Sometimes she reads too, but mostly she watches out the window, lost in the flurries of snow, the movement of the clouds.

The loss of her brother.

One day, when Wanda is watching the skies outside and Vision is helping Luna with a particularly complex passage his niece pauses, her finger marking her place. She glances to her aunt at the window, watching, still, so still she barely looks as though she is breathing.

“Is she going to be well?” Luna asks. “With Papa gone?”

Vision is grieved that he does not have an answer. “I don’t know,” he offers instead. “Perhaps in time.”

Luna’s voice is small, almost scared. “Are you going to go too?”

He has reason to he knows. The twins lied to him and manipulated him and tried to kill him. They had done the same to others, had _killed_ others. The house - still awoken, still curling around them as protective as a hound with its pups - is an ever-present marker of the magic of blood, of those they killed. Wanda - his wife, yes, the woman he loves, yes, the woman who _betrayed_ him and who _manipulated_ him, that too - is silent at the window, grieving her brother, the man who had tried to kill him.

Vision does not think anyone would quite be able to manage a sensible response in the face of all of this.

“Not yet,” Vision says. “We shall have to see. But I will not leave you yet.”

Luna goes back to her book. At the window Vision thinks he sees Wanda dip her head, something shining on her cheek, as though she had been listening.

She still says nothing.

Days pass. Winter builds and eases, the pathway to the village clears. On one visit to the village to get letters and coal for Pietro’s machine he realises: he could leave, if he wished, and no one could stop him. But he doesn’t. He trudges back up the clay path, a bundle of letters tucked into his pocket, a heavy hand-cart of coal pulled along behind him.

As the weather begins to warm Vision moves Luna’s lessons down to the main room, now they no longer need to huddle in one room by one fire to conserve fuel and warmth. Wanda stays at the window though, upstairs excepting when she descends to make tea, to fetch a new book for Luna. Her face has more colour now but she is still silent.

“Will she ever speak again?” Luna asks one day, when Wanda has just left the room after passing a book to her niece. Vision doesn’t think he’s heard a word from Wanda, a single sound even when she has been weeping since she screamed at the ghosts of her parents.

“I don’t know,” Vision finds himself saying again. “Shock and grief can do strange things to people. We must let her grieve at her own pace.”

Luna looks thoughtful - she is still so sombre a child, accepting of the heavy and harsh just as she is of the light and playful and treats both with equal seriousness. She had accepted her father’s death with some few tears, had clutched Wanda’s nightgown and stayed by her aunt until her hiccups subsided and then… she had somehow pulled herself together.

Vision wonders at what Wanda had said, that Luna had tapped into the heartsblood of the house and not the heartsblood of the hills and wonders if all of the death has made Luna so.

Luna’s voice is quiet as she says, “I hope she speaks again.”

“So do I,” Vision says softly. “So do I.”

Winter continues to fade away, spring flourishes from the soil. The red of the clay seeps back underneath as the grass springs up and flowers spread over the grounds. The fields outside, those that had had all their clay excised until they were, as Wanda called them, scabs, remain bare of flowers, but the grass begins to spread over them too, turning the lands around the hall a bright and glorious green.

It is some time after the final crocuses have flourished up, once the final snows have melted away completely that Wanda finally speaks.

“I am sorry,” she says, her hand in Vision’s, and it is all he can do, one hand cupping her cheek, her eyes so sad-sombre, not to kiss her. “I am sorry.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Songs that helped me write this monstrosity, in no particular order:
> 
> 01\. [Voodoo In My Blood - Massive Attack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElvLZMsYXlo)  
> 02\. [Salvation - Scanners](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCLQB94_pVw)  
> 03\. [Atop the Fourth Wall (The Living Tombstone's Remix) Instrumental - Vincent E.L.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ9LbQByNS8)  
> 04\. [The Great Shipwreck of Life - IAMX](www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IpbKo1wLDk)  
> 05\. [Lose Your Soul - Dead Man's Bones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnEkboR86h0)  
> 06\. [Poison - Alice Cooper](www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq4j1LtCdww)  
> 07\. [Building Better Worlds (VIP Remix) - Aviators](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR8dquu5EfI)  
> 08\. [Nightmare - Aviators](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRlKpiqJ-mk)  
> 09\. [The First Word (Electric Domination Remix) - Aviators](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0uBClOo96c)  
> 10\. [Darksightedness (Dark Bowser - Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story) - Kammo64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nwwTzgAHMY)  
> 11\. [Become Death (Metalhead - Vectorman) - Darkmoocher, timaeus222](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7hnJPAo_JU)  
> 12\. [Blood Of The Lamb - Wilco & Billy Bragg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIfxLgB9cW8)  
> 13\. [Paradise Circus - Massive Attack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEgX64n3T7g)  
> 14\. [Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool - Editors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T6GhYdwI7g)  
> 15\. [Dead Inside - Muse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5sJhSNUkwQ)  
> 16\. [Dangerous (Sebu Remix) - Big Data](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL02tugv5T4)  
> 17\. [Wolf Like Me - TV on the Radio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03hC_Ml8aAM)  
> 18\. [Farewell To The Fairground - White Lies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlmSqyMT0FQ)  
> 19\. [Space (Michael Creange & WEKEED Remix) - Magic Wands](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJr6NQw16O0)  
> 20\. [My Secret Friend - IAMX ft. Imogen Heap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-jMWzfj9gM)  
> 21\. [Force - Alan Walker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqYQXIt4SpA)  
> 22\. [A Hazy Shade Of Winter - The Bangles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxrwImCJCqk)  
> 23\. [Dead Silence - Billy Talent](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lf8PznMCyE)
> 
> Thanks to all of you who read this far and I hope you enjoyed it and feel up to leaving comments.


End file.
